Day one of the January 6 committee hearings has finally arrived. At 8:00 tonight, we’ll begin to learn what the committee has discovered about the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election and Trump’s culpability for the attack on the Capitol building last year. We’ll be live-blogging the hearings, so please check in tonight and share your reactions. We can use this post or, if necessary, we’ll post another thread tonight.
When the US House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection opens its hearings on Thursday evening, it will do so in prime time and with primetime production values. The seven Democrats and two Republicans – shunned by their own party – who sit on the panel are pulling out all the stops in an attempt to seize the public’s attention.
They have brought onboard a former president of ABC News, James Goldston, a veteran of Good Morning America and other mass-market TV programmes, to tightly choreograph the six public hearings into movie-length episodes ranging from 90 minutes to two and a half hours. His task: to fulfill the prediction of one of the Democratic committee members, Jamie Raskin, that the hearings “will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House”….
Reports suggest that one ratings-boosting tactic under consideration would be to show clips from the committee’s interviews with Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner. They were witness to many of Donald Trump’s rantings in the buildup to January 6, and highlights of their quizzing could command a large audience.
As a counterpoint to the glamorous couple, the committee is also likely to focus during the opening session on the activities of far-right groups including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. This week, the justice department charged the national chairman of the Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and four of the group’s other leaders with seditious conspiracy.
The indictments will act as backdrop to two of the committee’s main ambitions for the hearings. First, to show in dramatic and previously unseen footage – edited for maximum effect on TV and social media alike – the harrowing violence and brutal destruction that was unleashed during the storming of the Capitol, in which the vice-president was forced to flee rioters shouting: “Hang Mike Pence.”
The second ambition is to convey to the American people that the maelstrom of rage was not random and unprompted, but rather the opposite – instigated, organised, meticulously planned and conceived by an array of conscious actors.
Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Monday offered a glimps of what’s to come.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here,” he said during a Washington Postinterview on Monday after noting that majorities in both the House and Senate found former President Trump guilty of inciting the attack on the Capitol. “We’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” he continued.
Raskin added that the committee has evidence of “concerted planning and premeditated activity” — in other words, “a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”
When asked whether Trump himself led this effort, Raskin acknowledged that “people are going to have to make judgments themselves about the relative role that different people played.” But, he added, “I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events. That’s the only way really of making sense of them all.”
Committee Vice Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) described efforts to overturn the election similarly, telling CBS on Sunday that the attack on the Capitol was one facet of an “extremely well-organized” conspiracy….
“No president has ever come close to doing what happened here in terms of trying to organize an inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” Raskin said at a Georgetown University event in April. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, white nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup.”
With public hearings kicking off this week, the House select committee investigating January 6 is zeroing in on former President Donald Trump, and is preparing to use its platform to argue that he was responsible for grave abuses of power that nearly upended US democracy.
The committee’s central mission has been to uncover the full scope of Trump’s unprecedented attempt to stop the transfer of power to President Joe Biden. This includes Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by pressuring state and federal officials, and what committee members say was his “dereliction of duty” on January 6 while his supporters ransacked the US Capitol.
Lawmakers will try to convict Trump in the court of public opinion – which is all they can do, because it’s not within their powers to actually indict Trump. But they have an emerging legal foundation to claim that Trump broke the law, thanks to a landmark court ruling from a federal judge who said it was “more likely than not” that Trump committed crimes regarding January 6.
These highly choreographed hearings will be the panel’s first opportunity to show the public what they’ve learned from more than 1,000 witness interviews and 135,000 documents. An avalanche of new information about January 6 has come to light since Trump’s impeachment trial in February 2021, where he was acquitted of one count of “incitement of insurrection.”
“We are going to tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat who serves on the committee, told the Washington Post earlier this week, adding that the committee “has found evidence of concerted planning and premediated activity” related to the events of January 6.
Cohen then wraps up the piece by summarizing what is known so far about “Trump’s leadership role in the anti-democratic scheme, and how it all fits into the ongoing criminal investigations.”
Then-President Donald Trump pressured the Secret Service for two weeks to come up with a plan for him to join his supporters on a march toward the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the Washington Post reported Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/pLvIQzAz4Q
When the House 6 January select committee convenes its first hearing to examine the worst attack on the US Capitol since 1814, the nine-member panel and the two witnesses who will testify Thursday will be the highest-profile occupants of the ornate Cannon House Office Building Caucus Room since the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee used it for hearings in the mid-20th century.
Seventy-four years after Hollywood luminaries like acclaimed screenwriter Dalton Trumbo were blacklisted after failing to answer that committee’s questions about whether they had “now or … ever been” members of the Communist Party, one of the film industry’s finest will once again be a star witness in the exact same room.
The select committee on Tuesday announced that one of the first two witnesses to testify in what is expected to be a series of at least eight hearings will be Nick Quested, the award-winning documentarian who earned an Oscar nomination for his film Restrepo in 2010. The other will be Caroline Edwards, a US Capitol Police officer who was one of the first to be on the receiving end of blows delivered by the pro-Trump mob who stormed the Capitol in hopes of preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Both witnesses will testify during the second hour of the two-hour hearing, following opening presentations by the select committee’s chairman – Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi – and Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice-chair.
The Independent has learned that the panel’s aim in putting Ms Edwards and Mr Quested in the spotlight for the first prime time hearing on the 6 January insurrection is to highlight the role played by the pro-Trump extremist groups in starting and escalating the violence.
Mr Quested, who spent the days leading up to the riot embedded with leaders of the Proud Boys gang as part of a documentary project, has already provided US authorities with footage of a 5 January 2021 meeting between then-Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Elmer Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the Oath Keepers.
The footage of Mr Tarrio and Mr Rhodes meeting on the eve of the insurrection appears to have figured prominently in grand jury proceedings which led to last week’s unsealing of an indictment against Mr Tarrio and four other Proud Boys members for seditious conspiracy.
The press has learned so much about what will happen tonight. I hope the committee will still have a few surprises for us.
Two more relevant reads:
The hearings must make it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that there should be a prosecution of Trump and all of the others in his close-knit circle who were involved. Should the hearings provide a roadmap to indictment, Attorney General Merrick Garland must not fail to act.
The House select committee on the Jan. 6 attack is finally beginning its televised hearings, and the Democratic faithful are hoping for a political punch in the nose to detractors — and a wakeup call to those who still don’t understand what actually happened during the insurrection.
“These hearings are important to accelerate awareness,” Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained to me. It remains to be seen if they can actually be the “punch in the nose” to Donald Trump that so many hope for.
Trump’s alleged activities on or before Jan. 6 include a conspiracy to obstruct a lawful function of the federal government. These hearings must energize the pursuit of justice, or they will be pointless – just more high wind in the trees.
Face it. Trump was impeached not once, but twice. We know what a grifter he is. We know he doesn’t care. Most of us believe him to be a crook. We have seen it all before. Can the hearings really shock the nation into a zeitgeist that leads us to a newfound respect for each other — and to a settling of accounts that holds Trump responsible for one of the worst days in the modern history of our country? Probably not.
Trump openly led the insurrection. Congress can’t prosecute him, but the DOJ can.
The nation needs indictments. You cannot have closure before you indict and prosecute every single person involved in the insurrection. You cannot stand over the dead corpse of democracy and declare we should move on.
In short, the hearings in Congress must make it clear beyond a reasonable doubt that there should be a prosecution of Trump and all of the others in his close-knit circle who were involved. Should the hearings provide a roadmap to indictment, Attorney General Merrick Garland must not fail to act….
What’s the worst-case scenario for these hearings? No needle movement. No charges. The entire issue fades into the mist like a bad case of COVID: You survive, but the cough persists.
Make no mistake, democracy is still in the balance and it has been since Trump slithered down that golden escalator and began his campaign for president.
We’re still in the moment, as Eisen would say. These are uncertain times and we must act. These hearings are important — easily as important as the hearings that helped bring down Nixon and perhaps even more. Today the entire government hangs in the balance.
Here's one way to view the Jan. 6 Committee and its potential for eventual accountability.
While it’s doubtful the hearings will meet the sky-high expectations of those who believed the committee would expose open-and-shut wrongdoing from some of the nation’s top officials, the prime-time hearings will deliver one thing: evidence for many of the lawsuits seeking to make former President Donald Trump and other election denialists actually pay for the violence.
“What the committee can’t do is hold people accountable. But that’s where criminal prosecutions and civil litigation comes in,” said Edward G. Caspar, an attorney representing injured and traumatized Capitol Police officers who are suing Trump after the violence insurrection….
one of the big challenges for the panel’s investigation—with its contentious lawsuits, secret interviews, and promises to expose the truth—is that it ultimately has no power to punish those who are responsible for last year’s attack on the Capitol.
So far, legal scholars and progressive activists have focused their exasperated calls for action on the Department of Justice. But the real action could come from lawsuits like the one Conrad Smith and seven fellow Capitol Police officers filed in August against Trump, his campaign, Stop the Steal election denial movement organizers like Ali Alexander and Roger Stone, and enforcer gangs like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers militia.
“The committee is playing a critical role here for America,” Caspar said. “If you think of the three means of seeking accountability for those responsible for the attack—congressional hearings, criminal prosecution, civil litigation—they’re like a three-legged stool. The committee can shine a very bright light on the evidence and present it to the public. That’s something the others can’t do.”
A lot is riding on the hearing tonight. If the committee can really “blow the roof off,” people who haven’t been paying close attention will continue to tune in upcoming hearings. Here’s hoping they can meet the challenge.
Please share your thoughts on all this, and I hope you’ll also check back tonight to help us live blog.
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After 26 students and teachers were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, Massachusetts expanded its already far-reaching gun safety law. Following a mass shooting in Las Vegas — the deadliest in US history — it was the first state to ban bump stocks. And when a teenager killed 17 people at a Parkland, Fla., high school, lawmakers here embraced their own “red flag” statute.
Tragedy has regularly proved to be an accelerant for change in Massachusetts, pushing state policymakers to tighten their already strict gun laws at a time when major federal changes have regularly stalled and Republican legislators in other states loosened theirs.
Now, in the wake of horrific gun violence in Buffalo, Uvalde, Texas, and elsewhere, activists and state officials are pointing to Massachusetts as a model, arguing that its rules weaving together background check mandates, far-reaching prohibitions, and local licensing standards should be a guide — if not for Congress, then other states.
“Massachusetts gun laws have been proven to work,” Governor Charlie Baker, a Republican who has backed gun safety measures, said Monday, adding that the firearm death rate in this state “justifies thinking about what has been done here in the larger context of the nation.”
“I’ve talked to governors in other states and basically have said to them that they really ought to take a look at Massachusetts laws and make some decisions of their own,” Baker said. “I think it’s undeniable that the laws we have here have worked pretty well.”
Only Hawaii had a lower firearm mortality rate than Massachusetts in 2020; the year before — and in 2016 and 2015, as well — no state did, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And while gun violence has permeated other urban centers, Boston actually saw a drop in homicides and shootings in 2021 and has experienced even fewer so far this year, according to police data.
David is absolutely right. Massachusetts has proven the NRA's bogus talking points wrong again and again Our strong gun laws—including strict licensing standards, a red flag law, and an assault weapons ban—help save lives. The rest of the country needs to follow suit. https://t.co/CPQHpYfFSh
Yesterday, Massachusetts legislators prepared a letter to encourage leaders in other states to consider using the our state’s gun laws as a model. Some information about Massachusetts gun laws from the Globe article linked above:
Massachusetts passed an assault weapons ban in 1998 and made it permanent in 2004, when the federal ban expired. It also limits ammunition magazines to 10 rounds and requires that any first-time applicant for a six-year firearm license undergo a gun safety course.
All license applicants are also subject to background checks, either for a Firearm Identification Card — which allows people to own and use some rifles or shotguns — or a license to carry, the state’s most popular gun license.
Known as a Class A license, it allows people to own and use handguns and certain other firearms, but also comes with an additional layer of scrutiny. Local police chiefs, who serve as the state’s licensing authority, can deny an applicant they deem to be unsuitable, allowing them the discretion to factor in considerations beyond someone’s criminal record.
That could include whether police have been called to their home, for example, or if they had been the subject of domestic violence incidents that didn’t result in arrests or charges.
Acting after the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., the Legislature tightened its laws further. That 2014 law now allows police chiefs who want to deny, suspend, or revoke a shotgun or rifle license to file a petition in court.
It also mandated the state join a national database for criminal and mental health background checks and required that Massachusetts create an online portal for conducting the required background checks for private gun transfers.
In Massachusetts, carrying a firearm without a license is punishable by a mandatory minimum sentence of 18 months. You can't buy or carry a firearm if you are under 21. Assault weapons are banned unless they were lawfully owned prior to September 14, 1994. https://t.co/9Ozen4ByZM
I’ve quoted a lot, because the Globe article is behind a paywall. It also discusses some problems that have cropped up, e.g. the red flag law has seldom been used, and the laws have gotten complex and difficult for enforcement officials to navigate. Nevertheless, there has not been a mass shooting here for 22 years and we have fewer gun deaths than every state except Hawaii.
Unfortunately, the Supreme Court may soon make it much more difficult for local lawmakers to keep their states and cities safe.
The NYPD has recovered more than 3,000 guns this year. But authorities are bracing for a ruling, expected from the U.S. Supreme Court this month, that could make it easier to legally carry a handgun in New York. https://t.co/7KzBknoKYw
Already this year, the New York Police Department has recovered more than 3,000 guns, and such arrests have hit a 28-year high. But across the city and state, authorities are bracing for a ruling, expected from the United States Supreme Court this month, which could strike down a century-old New York State law that places strict limits on the carrying of handguns.
Overturning the law could make it far easier to legally carry a handgun in the state, which officials say may have violent consequences for cities already struggling to tamp down a spike in gun crime that began two years ago.
“A lot more people are going to now want to go out and get guns. And for all the wrong reasons,” said Richard Aborn, the president of the nonprofit Citizens Crime Commission. “I have people telling me they decided to get a gun that I never dreamed would go out and get a gun. They’re not going to use it illegally but they’re feeling this need to arm themselves in a way that I’ve not seen before.”
And if more New Yorkers are armed, he said, what would otherwise have been minor confrontations could turn deadly.
When the Supreme Court heard arguments over the law in November, a number of justices appeared predisposed against it, leading experts to believe that the law is likely to be struck down. If that happens, the ramifications could reach beyond New York: A handful of other states, including California, Connecticut, Maryland and Massachusetts, have similar laws that could also be invalidated.
New York State requires anyone who wants to purchase a handgun to apply for a state license. But there is an additional level of scrutiny for people who want a license that allows them to carry their gun outside their home. The two petitioners before the Supreme Court, both upstate New Yorkers, are challenging the laws governing the carrying of handguns, though gun control advocates in the state worry that the rules for acquiring handguns will be next….
In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul has said that she would consider calling a special session of the State Legislature if the law were overturned. And after a shooting in Buffalo last month in which a teenager motivated by racism killed 10 Black people at a grocery store, she brought up the law unprompted, saying that her administration was “preparing our state for what could be a Supreme Court decision that allows people to carry concealed weapons. We’re ready.”
I imagine Massachusetts lawmakers are also preparing.
With the January 6 hearings coming up on Thursday night, is it possible Trump could eventually get his comeuppance? I sure hope so.
May was a bad month for former President Donald Trump. And there are darkening clouds on his horizon. On June 9, the Jan. 6 House select committee will hold public hearings as part of its ongoing investigation into the storming of the Capitol last year. In short order, the set of six scheduled televised sessions this month are likely to build momentum toward making the case that the president was directly involved in attempts to undermine the peaceful transition of power. And as the steady dropping of shocking findings from the committee over the course of the past months suggests, the sessions will likely have many viewers on the edge of their seats.
June’s hearings follow a series of escalations in Trump’s ongoing legal battles stemming from his attempts to undermine the 2020 election. May’s legal developments and the looming hearings suggest increasing pressures and prospects that Trump will face criminal charges.
Why was May so bad for Trump? It’s not just a matter of investigators closing in. Georgia’s primary on May 24 delivered a blow to Trump. Three men the former president loves to hate—Gov. Brian Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Attorney General Chris Carr—all defeated Trump’s candidates in the Republican primary. Trump is already trying to cast doubt on their election results, raising questions about Kemp’s 50-point win over David Perdue. Georgia voters, however, signaled they are ready to move on from the Big Lie.
Meanwhile, two parallel criminal investigations are heating up—one from the Justice Department and another from District Attorney Fani Willis in Atlanta. Willis is independently investigating Trump’s phone call with Raffensperger in which he shamelessly asked Raffensperger “to find 11,780 votes,” one more than needed to reverse Joe Biden’s Georgia victory. She is also looking into Trump’s pre–Jan. 6 conduct for violation of the state’s criminal prohibition on soliciting election fraud. Last week, we learned that she has subpoenaed 50 witnesses, including Raffensperger, who testified on June 2 for five hours before a grand jury. She has also subpoenaed Chris Carr for June 21.
As for the Justice Department, it is reportedly ramping up its inquiry into Trump’s circle and the fake elector scheme that Rudy Giuliani allegedly led for the Trump campaign. On May 31, the Guardian reported that DOJ’s May 26 subpoena to former Trump aide Peter Navarro specifically refers to Trump and seeks communications with him, hinting at tightening scrutiny for the former president. (On June 2, the DOJ indicted Navarro on two counts of contempt for defying the committee’s subpoena to testify and provide documents.)
There’s more at the Slate link.
A couple of previews of what we might learn from Thursday’s hearing:
NEW: Filmmaker Nick Quested, whose crew was embedded with the Proud Boys on and around Jan. 6 and captured some of the most important moments during the riot, will be a witness at the first hearing of the Jan. 6 select committee.
Nick Quested, a British documentarian who was embedded with the Proud Boys in the period around Jan. 6, will be one of the witnesses Thursday when the Jan. 6 select committee presents its findings of the violent attack that threatened the transition of presidential power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden.
Quested captured some of the most harrowing and vivid footage from the front lines of the violence that day, including key moments of confrontation between members of the mob and Capitol Police just before rioters stormed the barricades. His crew was also present for key conversations among Proud Boys leaders, as well as a garage meeting between the group’s national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, whose group also played a central role in the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.
The inclusion of Quested among the witnesses suggests the first hearing will focus substantially on the role of the Proud Boys in the attack. That focus dovetails with a decision by the Justice Department on Monday to escalate its case against the leaders of the group, charging Tarrio and four others with seditious conspiracy for their alleged plans to stop the transition of power by force….
The select committee and DOJ have come to view the Proud Boys as key instigators of the Jan. 6 violence. Though members of the group itself were not charged with assaulting police, the charges against them describe their actions as drivers of the most pivotal moments during the riot. Prosecutors have indicated that the Proud Boys strategy included activating non-Proud-Boys members of the crowd — who they referred to as “normies” — to help push past police. The Justice Department has also described the Proud Boys as “directing” and “mobilizing” the crowd to both march to the Capitol, breach its grounds and enter the building itself.
For example, prosecutors have noted that Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs briefly huddled with Ryan Samsel, another charged defendant, just before Samsel charged at a police barricade. Samsel’s push resulted in the first barricades being toppled, causing the first rush of rioters to the food of the Capitol.
An hour later, Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, one of the other defendants in the case, used a stolen police riot shield to smash a Senate-wing window, the first breach of the Capitol building itself. A fellow Proud Boy who helped Pezzola carry the shield, Charles Donohoe, recently pleaded guilty to his involvement in the group’s efforts.
A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Post shows. https://t.co/FuScvNrZau
— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) June 6, 2022
From the article:
A staffer for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign instructed Republicans planning to cast electoral college votes for Trump in Georgia despite Joe Biden’s victory to operate in “complete secrecy,” an email obtained by The Washington Post shows.
“I must ask for your complete discretion in this process,” wrote Robert Sinners, the campaign’s election operations director for Georgia, the day before the 16 Republicans gathered at the Georgia Capitol to sign certificates declaring themselves duly elected. “Your duties are imperative to ensure the end result — a win in Georgia for President Trump — but will be hampered unless we have complete secrecy and discretion.”
The Dec. 13, 2020, email went on to instruct the electors to tell security guards at the building that they had an appointment with one of two state senators. “Please, at no point should you mention anything to do with Presidential Electors or speak to the media,” Sinners continued in bold.
The admonishments suggest that those who carried out the fake elector planwere concerned that, had the gathering become public before Republicans could follow through on casting their votes, the effort could have been disrupted. Georgia law requires that electors fulfill their duties at the State Capitol. On Dec. 14, 2020, protesters for and against the two presidential candidates had gathered on the Capitol grounds.
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which begins public hearings on Thursday, is likely to highlight the scheme to appoint fake electors and explore whether top Trump campaign officials initiated the strategy as part of a larger effort to overturn the democratic election.
I’ve also heard that the committee will play video from testimony by Ivanka and Jared. It should be an interesting night. I can’t wait!
What are your thoughts on all this? What other stories have caught your attention today?
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It’s going to be an interesting week as we start the January 6 committee’s public hearings on the insurrection on Thursday evening. The times are listed in EDT to the left of the headline. NBC asks the big questions: “The Jan. 6 committee begins hearings with a big challenge: Capture public attention. Whether the public hearings will be considered a success for Democrats largely depends on what comes after and whether legislation or prosecutions follow.”
Seldom has a set of congressional hearings opened amid so much anticipation and, at the same time, so little guarantee of success.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitolwill hold the first of at least a half-dozen public hearings this week, having already promised stunning revelations that would lay bare just how dangerously close the U.S. came to losing its democracy.
“It’s all about democratic resiliency. Can we fortify our institutions and our people against insurrection, coups and violence?” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a committee member, told NBC News. “I hope we will be able to spur the country to make the necessary reforms to solidify democracy.”
Thursday is when the suspense lifts and the nine-member committee gets to tell all.
But what will success look like? The question has weighed on committee members and congressional Democrats who have invited the panel to present both a definitive accounting of the riot and tangible solutions to prevent another.
What comes later is likely to determine whether the committee’s work is judged a success or a failure, according to interviews with more than 20 committee members, other lawmakers, witnesses, congressional aides and political strategists.
As the panel sees it, the hearings can’t just come and go. Members are looking for accountability. The committee isn’t a law enforcement body, so it can’t prosecute anyone. Yet if members lay out a compelling story about the far-flung effort to deny Joe Biden his rightful victory, it could pressure the Justice Department to ramp up its own inquiry.
“I am really very hopeful that what [the committee] will produce will be a road map — not just for Congress, but for the Department of Justice and for the American people who want to preserve our democracy,” Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who was trapped in the gallery of the House chamber during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, said in an interview.
This is Kristal. She was three weeks old and riddled with fleas when we cleaned her up and started bottle feeding her. Temple adores her. She’s healthy and active now!
The founder of the People of Praise, a secretive charismatic Christian group that counts supreme court justice Amy Coney Barrett as a member, was described in a sworn affidavit filed in the 1990s as exerting almost total control over one of the group’s female members, including making all decisions about her finances and dating relationships.
The court documents also described alleged instances of a sexualized atmosphere in the home of the founder, Kevin Ranaghan, and his wife, Dorothy Ranaghan.
The description of the Ranaghans and accusations involving their intimate behavior were contained in a 1993 proceeding in which a woman, Cynthia Carnick, said that she did not want her five minor children to have visitations with their father, John Roger Carnick, who was then a member of the People of Praise, in the Ranaghan household or in their presence, because she believed it was not in her children’s “best interest”. Cynthia Carnick also described inappropriate incidents involving the couple and the Ranaghan children. The matter was eventually settled between the parties.
Barrett, 50, lived with Dorothy and Kevin Ranaghan in their nine-bedroom South Bend, Indiana, home while she attended law school, according to public records. The justice – who was then known as Amy Coney – graduated from Notre Dame Law School in 1997 and two years later married her husband, Jesse Barrett, who also appears to have lived in the Ranaghan household. There is no indication that Amy Coney Barrett lived in the house at the time when the Carnick children were visiting or witnessed any of the alleged behavior described in the court documents.
The examination of the People of Praise’s history and attitude towards women comes as a majority of the supreme court – including Barrett – appear poised to reverse Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that made abortion legal across the US.
Cynthia Carnick stated in the documents that she had witnessed Dorothy Ranaghan tie the arms and legs of two of the Ranaghans’ daughters – who were three and five at the time the incidents were allegedly witnessed – to their crib with a necktie. She also said that the Ranaghans allegedly practiced “sexual displays” in front of their children and other adults, such as Dorothy Ranaghan lying with her clothes on and “rocking” on top of Kevin Ranaghan in their TV room.
Cynthia Carnick – who no longer uses Carnick as her last name – declined to comment but said that she stood by the statement she made at the time.
This is horrifying. We have too many sick, sick individuals on the Supreme Court right now appointed by Republicans appeasing these types of cults. One piece of good news on the SCOTUS front did come out today. This is from USA Today. “Supreme Court declines appeal over law licenses from St. Louis couple who waved guns at protest. Mark and Patricia McCloskey drew national attention for walking onto their front yard with guns during a 2020 protest of the police killing of George Floyd.”
The protesters were walking to the home of the St. Louis mayor at the time.
Mark McCloskey pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge and Patricia McCloskey pleaded guilty to misdemeanor harassment. Missouri Gov. Michael Parson pardoned the McCloskeys in 2021 but the state office responsible for investigating allegations of misconduct by lawyers sought to suspend their law licenses.
Feinstein is now both the definition of the American political Establishment and the personification of the inroads women have made over the past 50 years. Her career, launched in a moment of optimism about what women leaders could do for this country, offers a study in what the Democratic Party’s has not been able to do. As Feinstein consolidated her power at the top of the Senate, the party’s losses steadily mounted. It has lost control of the Supreme Court; it is likely about to lose control of Congress. Children are being gunned down by the assault weapons Feinstein has fought to ban, while the Senate — a legislative body she reveres — can only stand by idly, ultimately complicit. States around the nation are banning books about racism as Black people are being shot and killed in supermarkets. Having gutted the Voting Rights Act, conservatives are leveraging every form of voter suppression they can, while the Senate cannot pass a bill to protect the franchise. The expected overturning of Roe v. Wade this summer will mark a profound step backward, a signal that other rights won during Feinstein’s adulthood, including marriage equality and full access to contraception, are just as vulnerable.
As the storied career of one of the nation’s longest-serving Democrats approaches its end, it’s easy to wonder how the generation whose entry into politics was enabled by progressive reforms has allowed those victories to be taken away. And how a woman who began her career with the support of conservationist communities in San Francisco, and who staked her political identity on advancing women’s rights, is now best known to young people as the senator who scolded environmental-activist kids in her office in 2019 and embraced Lindsey Graham after the 2020 confirmation hearings of Amy Coney Barrett, a Supreme Court justice who appears to be the fifth and final vote to end the constitutional right to an abortion. As Feinstein told Graham, “This is one of the best set of hearings that I’ve participated in.”
For many from a younger and more pugilistic left bucking with angry exasperation at the unwillingness of Feinstein’s generation to make room for new tactics and leadership before everything is lost, the senator is more than simply representative of a failed political generation — she is herself the problem. After she expressed her unwillingness to consider filibuster reform last year, noting that “if democracy were in jeopardy, I would want to protect it, but I don’t see it being in jeopardy right now,” The Nation ran a piece headlined “Dianne Feinstein Is an Embarrassment.”
Feinstein, who turns 89 in June, is older than any other sitting member of Congress. Her declining cognitive health has been the subject of recent reporting in both her hometown San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times. It seems clear that Feinstein is mentally compromised, even if she’s not all gone. “It’s definitely happening,” said one person who works in California politics. “And it’s definitely not happening all the time.”
Reached by phone two days after 19 children were murdered in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, in late May, Feinstein spoke in halting tones, sometimes trailing off mid-sentence or offering a non sequitur before suddenly alighting upon the right string of words. She would forget a recently posed question, or the date of a certain piece of legislation, but recall with perfect lucidity events from San Francisco in the 1960s. Nothing she said suggested a deterioration beyond what would be normal for a person her age, but neither did it demonstrate any urgent engagement with the various crises facing the nation.
“Oh, we’ll get it done, trust me,” she assured me in reference to meaningful gun reform. Every question I asked — about the radicalization of the GOP, the end of Roe, the failures of Congress — was met with a similar sunny imperviousness, evincing an undiminished belief in institutional power that may in fact explain a lot about where Feinstein and other Democratic leaders have gone wrong. “Some things take longer than others, and you can only do what you can do at a given time,” she said. “That doesn’t mean you can’t do it at another time. And so one of the things that you develop is a certain kind of memory for progress: when you can do something in terms of legislation and have a chance of getting it through, and when the odds are against it, meaning the votes and that kind of thing. So I’m very optimistic about the future of our country.”
Krystal bonded with Temple pretty quickly while the other cats are still getting adjusted to her.
It’s a long read but well worth it if you remember the year of the woman that brought a few more women senators to the District. There are also two features on some of the worst of the worst Republicans if you want to check them out. Steve Bannon is the Focus of “American Rasputin” at The Atlantic. Blind justice is still chasing that one. Hot Air follows the latest Elon Musk Drama with the headline “BREAKING:Musk threatens to dump deal in letter to Twitter, SEC.” The last one doesn’t surprise me at all. It’s from The Bulwark. “The Long History of Glenn Greenwald’s Kissing Up to the Kremlin. In his world, it seems America can do nothing right and Vladimir Putin can do nothing wrong.” I really don’t want to quote them but you may want to skim them and see if anything interests you. I’ll give you a taste of Cathy Young’s piece on Greenwald.
But Greenwald has been baffling and disappointing legions of his progressive admirers for years with his cozy relationship with the MAGA right. And a look at his career shows that his pro-Kremlin affinity goes way back—as part of a more general tendency to sympathize with foes of the U.S.-led “neoliberal” (or “neoconservative”) international order.
A CBS poll shows how out of step a lot of Republicans are with the rest of the county. “In a new @CBSNewsPoll , 72% of the nation believes mass shootings are preventable, however, there is a partisan split with 44% of Republicans saying mass shootings are something we have to accept.” That’s like basically saying we can’t cure all cancers so just give up on it. Or maybe, what you have is cancer, so we’ll just inject more cancer in there.
I just really have trouble understanding this viewpoint. It seems so irrational.
In a new @CBSNewsPoll, 72% of the nation believes mass shootings are preventable, however, there is a partisan split with 44% of Republicans saying mass shootings are something we have to accept. @SalvantoCBS breaks down these numbers. pic.twitter.com/JE9B39wHdM
The big picture: Most of the deadliest shootings in the U.S. since 2018 were committed by men who were 21 or younger.
Between the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, committed by a 20-year-old, and late 2017, killers were between the ages of 26 and 64. All of them were men.
When looking at school shootings specifically, killers tend to be younger, PolitiFact reports.
Nearly half of homicides in 2020 were committed by people 29 and under, according to the most recent FBI data on the matter.
The problem seems to be getting worse. Per the New York Times, only two of the deadliest mass shootings from 1949 to 2017 were committed by gunmen under 21. The two were the Columbine High School shooting in 1999 and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012.
“We see two clusters when it comes to mass shooters, people in their 40s who commit workplace type shootings, and a very big cluster of young people — 18, 19, 20, 21 — who seem to get caught up in the social contagion of killing,” Jillian Peterson, a criminal justice professor who helped found the Violence Project, told the New York Times.
State of play: Under federal law, a person has to be 18 or older to buy a shotgun or a rifle, though some states have a higher limit of 21. Additionally, there is no law preventing teens or even kids from being given a rifle as a gift.
Something could be done to lessen the ability of the under 21 crowd to access guns.
Oh to be able to sleep like a kitten!
So I hope my sweet fluffy kitten brightens your day even if the situation in our country is dire. Even local Republicans are bracing for the impact of Trump on their next round of primaries. This is from Natasha Korecki at NBC News. “Republicans brace for next round of Trump primary chaos. State party officials and other members of the GOP in Nevada, Wisconsin and Missouri say they’re concerned about coming contests and the effects of Trump’s 2020 fixation.”
“I wish Trump would sit down and keep quiet. I think the country’s had enough of him,” said Perry DiLoreto, a prominent Nevada businessman and longtime GOP donor who backed Trump in 2016 and 2020.
In the state’s upcoming GOP primary for Senate, he ignored Trump’s endorsement of former Nevada attorney general Adam Laxalt and instead supported retired Army Capt. Sam Brown.
“Donald Trump was a great example of somebody that had some good ideas and had good common sense. But to move any of those ideas forward, you have to know how to have civil dialogue with people,” DiLoreto said.
Republicans in states like Nevada, Missouri and Wisconsin are airing their frustrations as they brace for primaries that could play a heavy hand in the fate of governor races or ultimately Senate control in November. Republicans in these states say they are increasingly turned off by Trump’s fixation on the unfounded contention that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, particularly since changes in voting laws have already played out in many states.
Their grumbling comes on the heels of a blowout loss of Trump-backed gubernatorial candidate David Perdue in Georgia — he lost by 50 points – only for Trump to push voter fraud conspiracy claims afterward. And it comes after the messy results in the Pennsylvania Senate primary, where Mehmet Oz and David McCormick went into overtime amid the narrowest of Oz leads. This again had Trump, who endorsed Oz, crying foul over ballot counting. (McCormick conceded on Friday.) Trump also backed far-right state Sen. Doug Mastriano in the governor’s contest, who went on to win, prompting an eruption within the state’s GOP that now fears it could lose a once competitive governor’s mansion in the fall.
The seesaw of emotions Republicans are expressing comes as more of the party rank and file members — who still adoringly back Trump and his politics — show signs that they’re open to new faces in the party to run for president in 2024.
I think expecting Orange Caligula to sit down and be quiet is a tall order. Hope springs eternal they say!
Anyway, enough for me today! What’s on your reading and blogging list?
And the sourdough boule is done!!!
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It seems as if mass shootings are contagious. Whenever there is a high profile case, more gun violence follows. There have been so many cases of gunmen shooting multiple people lately that the massacre of ten people in Buffalo seems to have receded into the past. But it happened only three weeks ago. It’s difficult not to feel helpless and despairing when these massacres keep happening and one political party stands in the way of the federal government doing anything to prevent them.
In the early hours after the shooting at a Tulsa medical center on Wednesday, the details were murky. Soon, it became clear that the death toll there was not going to be as nearly as high as the tolls from the recent shootings in Uvalde and Buffalo.
Four people were killed in Tulsa (in addition to the gunman), compared with 21 in Uvalde and 10 in Buffalo. But the Tulsa shooting is nonetheless horrific in its own way — not only for its victims and their families but also for what it says about gun violence in the United States.
Shootings that kill multiple people are so common in this country that they often do not even make national news. They are a regular feature of American life. Tulsa has become the latest example — yet another gun crime that seems almost ordinary here and yet would be extremely rare in any other country as wealthy as the U.S.
To give you a sense of how common these shootings are, we’re devoting the rest of the lead item of today’s newsletter to a list of every documented mass shooting in which a gunman has killed at least three people in the U.S. so far this year. (The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as any in which at least four people are shot, including survivors.)
Among the patterns we noticed: Family disputes are a common motivation, and gang disputes are another. Every identified suspect has been a man, many under 25. Baltimore and Sacramento have experienced multiple such mass shootings this year.
Read the list of incidents at the NYT link. On May 25, NPR counted 213 mass shootings in 2022.
When Vanderbilt University psychiatrist Jonathan Metzl learned that the perpetrator of the Uvalde, Tex., school massacre was a young man barely out of adolescence, it was hard not to think about the peculiarities of the maturing male brain.
Salvador Rolando Ramos had just turned 18, eerily close in age to Nikolas Cruz, who had been 19 when he shot up a school in Parkland, Fla. And to Adam Lanza, 20, when he did the same in Newtown, Conn. To Seung-Hui Cho, 23, at Virginia Tech. And to Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17, in Columbine, Colo.
Teen and young adult males have long stood out from other subgroups for their impulsive behavior. They are far more reckless and prone to violence than their counterparts in other age groups, and their leading causes of death include fights, accidents, driving too fast, or, as Metzl put it, “other impulsive kinds of acts.”
“There’s a lot of research about how their brains are not fully developed in terms of regulation,” he said.
Perhaps most significantly, studies show, the prefrontal cortex, which is critical to understanding the consequences of one’s actions and controlling impulses, does not fully develop until about age 25. In that context, Metzl said, a shooting “certainly feels like another kind of performance of young masculinity.”
In coming weeks and months, investigators will dissect Ramos’s life to try to figure out what led him to that horrific moment at 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, May 24 when he opened fire on a classroom full of 9- and-10-year-olds at Robb Elementary School. Although clear answers are unlikely, the patterns that have emerged about mass shooters in the growing databases, school reports, medical notes and interview transcripts show a disturbing confluence between angry young men, easy access to weapons and reinforcement of violence by social media….
“Age is the untold story of all this stuff,” said Metzl, who is also a sociologist. “I feel very strongly we should not have people 18 to 21 with guns.”
Read the rest at the WaPo.
Summer Morning, Sleeping Cat, by Yuanchi Qiao
There’s still a lot of discussion in the media about the disastrous response of law enforcement in the Uvalde school massacre.
Ten days after a gunman slaughtered 19 students and their two teachers in their classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, there are still significant gaps in the information officials have released about law enforcement’s response.
“My point as a policymaker, which is the third function of my job, is to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde.
“How in the world are we going to be able to do anything if we can’t figure out what happened in that building in those 40 minutes?”
The shifting police narratives, unanswered questions and the horror of knowing 21 victims were trapped with a gunman for more than an hour — despite repeated 911 calls for help from inside the classrooms — is tormenting this small Texas city.
Gutierrez has questioned whether the responding officers on scene were aware of those calls as they stood outside the classrooms. It’s also unclear whether the incident commander, who made the call for the officers not to confront the shooter immediately, was on scene as the shooting unfolded.
Victims’ families and other local residents are angry. At a school board meeting last night, Superintendent Hall Harrell said that Robb Elementary would not reopen. After that, the board went into a “lengthy closed-door session.
Angela Turner, a mother of five who lost her niece in the shooting, expressed outrage. “We want answers to where the security is going to take place. This was all a joke,” she told reporters, referring to the meeting. “I’m so disappointed in our school district.”
Turner insisted that she will not send her children to school unless they feel safe, adding that her 6-year-old child told her, “I don’t want to go to school. Why? To be shot?”
“These people will not have a job if we stand together, and we do not let our kids go here,” she said as she pointed to a vacant school board podium.
Dawn Poitevent, a mother whose child was slated to attend Robb Elementary as a second-grader, was tearful as she told reporters that she wants the board to consider letting her child stay at his current school, Dalton Elementary.
“I just need to keep my baby safe, and I can’t promise him that. Nobody can promise their children that right now,” Poitevent said. “At least if he goes to Dalton, he’s not going to be scared, and he’s not going to be having the worst first day that I can possibly imagine.”
Poitevent added that her son, Hayes, has been telling her that he’s scared to go to school because a “bad man” will shoot him.
“We’re just trying so hard to get past everything,” she said. “We’re trying to bury our babies and say goodbye to people that really mattered.”
It took more than an hour for police officers to enter and stop the gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at Uvalde’s Robb elementary school last Tuesday in Texas.
In that time, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos fired more than 100 shots while as many as 19 police officers stood outside waiting and desperate parents tried to break victims out of the school windows. It has been reported that one teacher and several children placed 911 calls while the gunman was inside the building….
The officers on duty had received active shooter training just two months before the massacre, prompting questions from parents, politicians and public safety officials about exactly what officers should have done and casting doubt on how effective such training is in reality.
What does the training manual say about dealing with school shooters?
“A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.” Those are the words, from an active shooter training manual used to train Uvalde’s school police on 21 March 2022, that have been repeated again and again since the shooting on Tuesday.
The Summer – Cat On A Balustrade, Theophile Steinlen
They refer to the lessons post-Columbine, the high school shooting in 1999 that led to the deaths of 15 people (including the suicides of both shooters). Before Columbine – which was the most deadly US mass shooting in history at the time – officers had been taught to form a perimeter around the school and wait for backup in the event of a school shooting, not unlike what allegedly happened at Uvalde on Tuesday. But after Columbine, law enforcement officials learned that not going in and directly confronting the shooter costs precious minutes and possibly lives.
The training materials encourage officers to confront the attacker in an active shooter situation, driving them away from victims, isolating and distracting them, even when it means putting themselves in harm’s way: “If they are engaged with the officer(s) they will be less capable of hurting innocents,” the manual says.
If officers are at the scene alone, they must go in alone, it says. “Time is the number one enemy during active shooter response … The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.”
The manual makes clear that not doing so will cost lives. “The number of deaths in an active shooter event is primarily affected by two factors: How quickly the police or other armed response arrives and engages them; How quickly the shooter can find victims,” it states.
Frankly, I don’t see why what happened is still being treated as a mystery. Let’s face it: those police officers are cowards. And Pete Arrendondo should be fired. Instead, he is now on the city council.
Everyone in town is waiting to hear from Pete Arredondo.
As chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department, it was his call to wait more than an hour for backup instead of ordering officers on scene to immediately charge the shooter who killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. The chief of the state police later said this was the “wrong decision, period.”
Now, Arredondo is a man in hiding, as calls for answers and accountability grow louder each day.
In the week since state police singled him out for blame, Arredondo has hardly been seen.
By Vladimir A Abat Cherkasov
Police officers stand guard outside his home. He has declined to explain his actions, telling a television crew that staked out his office he would not do so until after the victims’ funerals. City officials, too, have assisted in the vanishing act. They canceled a previously scheduled public ceremony Tuesday and instead swore in Arredondo in secret for his latest role on the City Council.
Even state police complained this week that Arredondo has remained elusive to them, accusing him of not cooperating with a Texas Department of Public Safety investigation into the shooting, a claim Arredondo refuted. The New York Times reported Friday that the chief arrived on scene without a radio, hampering his ability to organize the response.
Residents here remain in mourning. Each day repeats a cycle of at least two funerals followed by processions to the cemetery on the west edge of town. Their grief, however, is giving way to frustration about how local officials have responded to the tragedy and conversations about how to hold them accountable.
For many, this starts with firing Arredondo and overhauling his department, which they believe failed the students it was supposed to keep safe.
That’s all I have for you today. Please post comments and links on any subject that interests you. This is an open thread.
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It should be an interesting June as we head towards public, televised hearings on the January 6th investigation and begin to see mentions of big fish testimony and big fish criminal indictments.
Nearly 11 months into its inquiry, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol already represents among the most complex and sprawling investigations in congressional history. In light of the volume and complexity of information, this resource is intended to organize and distill key prongs of the multifaceted campaign to overturn the 2020 election. Particularly in advance of this month’s public hearings, it also highlights key facts and findings that are already known, as well as important unanswered questions.
The resource is structured around the key prongs of the investigation itself — how the Select Committee has organized its investigative work — which mirror the key prongs of the campaign to overturn the election. The Committee’s investigative teams are color-coded in name (Gold, Blue, Purple, Red, and Green); this primer has in turn highlighted key facts and findings according to that same organizational structure.
Critically, “January 6th” has, like “Watergate,” become a useful shorthand. But as with Watergate, January 6th represents neither a single nor isolated event, but instead a much broader and more multifaceted effort to stop the transfer of power. We hope this resource is useful in distilling those components and what we critically know — and don’t yet know — about each. This resource was produced as a collaboration between Just Security and Protect Democracy.
The Primer is available in Scribd format below and also as a PDF.
It is worth downloading and reviewing this to get a sense of what each team has to date. The first page dedicated to the gold team’s findings is a really good reminder of what we know at the topmost levels. I can’t reproduce any of it here but the PDF is free to view and download. I intend to keep it handy as the hearings progress.
U.S. Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), with Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol speak to reporters after meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) at the Capitol in Washington, U.S. July 1, 2021. Jonathan Ernst | Reuters
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released an official notice that it will hold the first hearing on what it has found so far about the deadly siege on Thursday, June 9 in prime time at 8 p.m. ET.
In the notice made late on Thursday, the panel also said witnesses for the hearing would be announced next week.
At the hearing, the panel will “present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings, and provide the American people a summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” it said.
This will be the first public hearing held by the committee in nearly a year. During the last hearing, in July, four police officers gave graphic accounts of the physical and verbal assaults they endured while protecting the Capitol and the lawmakers who had gathered on Jan. 6, 2021, to count and certify states’ electoral votes from the 2020 election. Over 100 law enforcement officers were injured and several people died after pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol to overturn the election results.
From Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair: “CAN THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE BREAKTHROUGH IN PRIME TIME?
Some panel members have hyped the upcoming public hearings as a Watergate-style moment, a chance to make their case in the court of public opinion. Yet one week out, the schedule—in Congress and on TV—is still being hashed out. ”
Ahead of the hearings, Axios on Wednesday revealed one “blockbuster” witness expected to testify: J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and lawyer who advised Vice President Mike Pence in the leadup to Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was pressuring Pence to use his traditionally ceremonial role as president of the Senate to overturn the 2020 election results. Luttig gave Pence the legal argument he used to defy Trump’s anti-democratic demand; the vice president quoted Luttig in a statement released moments before the joint session of Congress.
While official invitations to testify have not been sent to Luttig, according to Axios, the conservative legal scholar is “expected to describe his view of the stakes of Jan. 6 and his argument that American democracy is at a crossroads” before answering questions—including, presumably, ones about the constitutional defense he armed Pence with. Luttig referenced such legal technicalities in April while warning in a CNN Op-Ed that “the last presidential election was a dry run for the next” for Trump and Republicans, who “began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election” hours after the insurrection and “have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public.” GOP efforts to elect election-denying candidates to state legislative offices in battleground states, as well as Trump supporters to Congress, are among Luttig’s examples.
The Luttig news comes as House committee members have promised fireworks at the public hearings, which, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, “will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House” and “will be compared to the Watergate hearings.” (Perhaps, but Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivanwrote in her latest column why a Watergate moment is unlikely, thanks in part to the right-wing media ecosystem that didn’t exist in the Nixon era.) Back in January—when the select committee was discussing potential hearing formats, including holding them in prime time, to build a maximum audience for testimony—Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, told Bloomberg, “The public needs to know, needs to hear from people under oath about what led up to January 6, and to some degree, what has continued after January 6.” Since then, Thompson has said that some of the hearings spread throughout June will be a “mixture of some prime time and some regular,” but aside from a draft recently reported by the Guardian, the schedule remains unclear. (The Jan. 6 committee did not respond to a request for comment.
NEW: With the first January 6th Select Committee hearings approaching, we've answered some questions about the committee's work and what to expect: https://t.co/zLOB5rdf1V
The January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol was the product of a months-long effort, led by former-President Donald Trump and enabled by members of Congress, state representatives, and political allies, to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. Since that deadly attack, the House of Representatives’ Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attacks on the United States Capitol has engaged in a deliberate and largely quiet effort to investigate the facts, circumstances, and causes that led to the attack. As the Committee prepares to hold its first public hearings beginning on June 9, CREW is proud to be one of the leading voices for accountability. Below we provide answers to some of the common questions about the Committee’s work, authority, and quest for accountability.
There are lots of questions with lots of answers. It’s a very good read.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro on Thursday spoke at length to MSNBC host Ari Melber about a lawsuit he has filed against the Justice Department and the House Jan. 6 committee after the DOJ subpoenaed him for documents and testimony. Navarro has indicated he will refuse, saying the subpoena demanded “fruit of the poisonous tree.”
Navarro was found to be in contempt of Congress last month for ducking a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee, with the House referring him – as well as Trump’s social media handler Dan Scavino – to the Justice Department for potential prosecution. When the Jan. 6 committee voted to move along the contempt charge, Navarro abruptly bailed on a scheduled appearance that night on Melber’s show.
Thursday’s appearance was yet another edition of the pair sparring over Navarro’s role in the events of Jan. 6, his refusal to cooperate with Congress, and yet his willingness to write a book and talk with the press. (Navarro told The Daily Beast in December about the “Green Bay Sweep” plan that he and Steve Bannon ginned up to try to thwart the 2020 election results and keep Trump in power.)
“You’re waging this legal battle not to talk to the committee, not to talk potentially to DOJ, although as you said, TBD,” Melber said. “So you’re risking going potentially to jail not to talk to them, but you’re out here talking in public. You do realize these investigators can hear you when you talk on TV?”
“What we’re talking about now, Ari, is the case law itself and the constitutionality of executive privilege, testimony, immunity. A second key issue in the case is the separation of powers,” Navarro replied. “This kangaroo committee has clearly violated the separation of powers. They’re not supposed to act as judge, jury, and executioner. They’re only supposed to pursue a legislative function.”
Melber said he’d take Navarro’s premise seriously, and Navarro replied: “You should. This is why I’m fighting. This is why I’m willing to go to jail for this.”
The pair went back and forth for 20 minutes, with Navarro offering no shortage of blustery opinions about what he believes should be done to congressional Democrats and the Biden administration.
Melber quoted Navarro’s lawsuit: “‘If an incumbent can strip a predecessor of privilege…just imagine what will happen to Biden and his advisers if Republicans win in 2024.’” Melber continued, “Quote, ‘If I’m not dead or in prison, I will lead the charge.’ What are you threatening? And are you suggesting that you would be in a Republican White House? And what will you do?”
BREAKING: Former Trump White House official Peter Navarro has been indicted on contempt of Congress charges for defying Jan. 6 committee subpoenas. https://t.co/fVASZPeGpb
Navarro is former President Donald Trump’s second aide to be charged with contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the Jan. 6, 2021, investigation, His arrest comes months after the indictment of former White House adviser Steve Bannon.
Navarro, 72, was charged with one contempt count for failing to appear for a deposition before the House committee. The second charge is for failing to produce documents the committee requested. He was taken into federal custody Friday morning and was expected to appear in federal court in Washington later in the afternoon.
The indictment underscores that the Justice Department is continuing to pursue criminal charges against Trump associates who have attempted to impede or stonewall the work of congressional investigators examining the most significant attack on U.S. democracy in decades.
Guess it’s not his day!
As you can see, the month has already started out blustery. It includes the first invest of the hurricane season. This is from Yale Climate Connections (and yes, I’m still being a nice little volunteer weather tracker for the NWS). “Disturbance 91L in the southeastern Gulf of Mexico likely to become the Atlantic’s first tropical cyclone of 2022. Hurricane Agatha’s remnants are invigorating the well-organized disturbance centered near the northeastern tip of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.”
Though 91L has strong model support for development, wind shear is predicted to remain high this week, and any storm that does form in the Gulf would likely be incapable of rapid intensification. The odds of development appear to be greater after the system crosses over the Florida Peninsula and enters the waters off the Southeast U.S. coast on Sunday (Figure 1).
The track of 91L will bring it to the coast of southwestern Florida on Saturday; at the time of landfall, 91L is likely to be no stronger than a 60-mph tropical storm, with a weaker storm more likely. Heavy rains from 91L will be its main threat, with seven-day rainfall amounts of five-plus inches expected over portions of Mexico, Cuba, South Florida, and the western Bahamas by Thursday, June 9 (Figure 2). Because of dry air to the northwest of the system, a sharp cutoff point for the heavy rains is expected over central Florida.
So, get ready for a June to remember!!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
This is horrifying. We have too many sick, sick individuals on the Supreme Court right now appointed by Republicans appeasing these types of cults. One piece of good news on the SCOTUS front did come out today. 
Dawn Poitevent, a mother whose child was slated to attend Robb Elementary as a second-grader, was tearful as she told reporters that she wants the board to consider letting her child stay at his current school, Dalton Elementary.
From Charlotte Klein at Vanity Fair: 
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