Monday Mojo Rising Reads

Olafur Eliasson, The Weather Project.2003
Tate Modern

Good Day Sky Dancers!

We’ve got another set of hearings coming up from the January 6th Committee.  The first one is tomorrow at 1:00 PM EST.  I’m going to highlight some links that will get us ready for Jamie Raskin’s presentation.  Nothing cleanses better than a little sunshine.

This is from Hugo Lowell at The Guardian: “January 6 hearing to focus on Trump’s tweet to extremist group. Former president’s notorious ‘Be there, will be wild!’ tweet was catalyst for violent protests, congress members will argue”.

The House January 6 select committee is expected to make the case at its seventh hearing Tuesday that Donald Trump gave the signal to the extremist groups that stormed the Capitol to target and obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college win.

The panel will zero in on a pivotal tweet sent by the former president in the early hours of the morning on 19 December 2020, according to sources close to the inquiry who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the forthcoming hearing.

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump said in the tweet. “Be there, will be wild!”

The select committee will say at the hearing – led by congressmen Jamie Raskin and Stephanie Murphy – that Trump’s tweet was the catalyst that triggered the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers groups, as well as Stop the Steal activists, to target the certification.

And Trump sent the tweet knowing that for those groups, it amounted to a confirmation that they should put into motion their plans for January 6, the select committee will say, and encouraged thousands of other supporters to also march on the Capitol for a protest.

The tweet was the pivotal moment in the timeline leading up to the Capitol attack, the select committee will say, since it was from that point that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers seriously started preparations, and Stop the Steal started applying for permits.

The select committee also currently plans to play video clips from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s recent testimony to House investigators at Tuesday’s hearing.

Raskin is expected to first touch on the immediate events before the tweet: a contentious White House meeting on 18 December 2020 where Trump weighed seizing voting machines and appointing conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell as special counsel to investigate election fraud.

The meeting involved Trump and four informal advisers, the Guardian has reported, including Trump’s ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn, ex-Trump campaign lawyer Sidney Powell, ex-Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne and ex-Trump aide Emily Newman.

Once in the Oval Office, they implored Trump to invoke executive order 13848, which granted him emergency powers in the event of foreign interference in the election – though that had not happened – to seize voting machines and install Powell as special counsel.

Woman Before the Rising Sun., Caspar David Friedrich, 1818 – 1820

This really brings it straight home to Trump.  The blog Just Security provides this analysis: “Strongest Evidence of Guilt: Chart Tracking Trump’s Knowledge and Intent in Efforts to Overturn the Election.” They have charted the key evidence showing Trump’s Guilt.

Since before the hearings began, public commentary has focused, in large part, on whether Trump knew he had lost the election. That quandary is irrelevant to the criminal intent required for several of the most relevant federal and state crimes. It is an important yet limited way to think of the evidence of knowledge and intent that prosecutors could rely upon in bringing charges.

The following list highlights just some of the information presented in the Chart below.

• Lying about victory on Election Night (Nov 3-Nov. 4 early AM)

• Manufacturing false allegations of election fraud (December 3, 2020-early January, 2021)

• Trying to force Department of Justice officials to lie about the department’s findings of election fraud (late December, 2020 – Jan. 3, 2021)

• Advancing false claims of election fraud after being told by senior DOJ and campaign officials of irrefutable flaws in the claims (Dec. 2020 – Jan. 6, 2021).

• Lying about communications with federal and state officials in efforts to pressure them (Jan. 2-Jan. 6, 2021)

The Chart contains several more entries describing related actions, knowledge, and beliefs.

The Sun, 1909, Edvard Munch

Here’s some background information on Cassidy Hutchinson from The New York Times. “Cassidy Hutchinson: Why the Jan. 6 Committee Rushed Her Testimony.  Sequestered with family and security, Ms. Hutchinson, 26, has in the process developed an unlikely bond with Representative Liz Cheney, the panel’s vice chairwoman.” This was reported by Robert Draper today.

In the two weeks since, Ms. Hutchinson’s account of an unhinged president who urged his armed supporters to march to the Capitol, lashed out at his Secret Service detail and hurled his lunch against a wall has turned her into a figure of both admiration and scorn — lauded by Trump critics as a 21st-century John Dean and attacked by Mr. Trump as a “total phony.”

Ms. Hutchinson’s testimony also pushed the committee to redouble its efforts to interview Pat A. Cipollone, Mr. Trump’s White House counsel, who appeared in private before the panel on Friday. His videotaped testimony is expected to be shown at the committee’s next public hearing on Tuesday.

Now unemployed and sequestered with family and a security detail, Ms. Hutchinson, 26, has developed an unlikely bond with Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and onetime aide to former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell during the George W. Bush administration — a crisis environment of another era when she learned to work among competing male egos. More recently, as someone ostracized by her party and stripped of her leadership post for her denunciations of Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney admires the younger woman’s willingness to risk her alliances and professional standing by recounting what she saw in the final days of the Trump White House, friends say.

What follows is an interesting background piece on “The path that led a young Trump loyalist to become a star witness against the former president was not exactly prefigured by Ms. Hutchinson’s biography.” You can read more at the link.

If we see Trump as a Shakespearean-level tragic hero, then Steve Bannon must play the Fool.  Of course, this can’t be a serious tragedy.  Because both of them are a bit more concerned with their Mister Mojo Rising than anything remotely resembling the character of any Shakespeare hero.  These folks are more like a play involving all villains as the main characters and Steve Bannon fools no one outside of the cult.

One week ahead of jury selection in Steve Bannon‘s contempt of Congress trial, the Justice Department said the Trump associate’s purported desire to reverse his stance and testify before the House Jan. 6 committee is nothing more than a “last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability.”

Bannon, citing a letter over the weekend from former President Donald Trump, said through a lawyer that he would be willing to testify before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon spent months blowing off the committee, claiming that Trump was asserting executive privilege despite the fact that Bannon only worked at the White House for seven months back in 2017, three years before the Jan. 6 attack.

But the Justice Department said in a new filing that Trump attorney Justin Clark confirmed in an FBI interview that Trump “never invoked executive privilege over any particular information or materials; that the former President’s counsel never asked or was asked to attend the Defendant’s deposition before the Select Committee; that the Defendant’s attorney misrepresented to the Committee what the former President’s counsel had told the Defendant’s attorney; and that the former President’s counsel made clear to the Defendant’s attorney that the letter provided no basis for total noncompliance.”

Meanwhile, I took Temple for her walk this morning to neutral ground and parking spaces filled with police cars.

There’s also a disturbance in the Gulf which is likely to flood the city this weekend.

Being at ground zero for total abortion bans is no fun either.

Watts, George Frederic; After the Deluge; Watts Gallery; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/after-the-deluge-13387

I put this potentially good news up with its original announcement on JJ’s thread yesterday but AP has picked it up so I’ll share it again. I think that you may actually be able to board in New Orleans because our law doesn’t forbid out-of-state travel for the procedure.  The ship would be in Federal Waters.  I’ve been pushing for this everywhere I could on social media.

A California doctor is proposing a floating abortion clinic in the Gulf of Mexico as a way to maintain access for people in southern states where abortion bans have been enacted.

The idea is to provide a clinic aboard a ship in federal waters, and out of reach of state laws, that would offer first trimester surgical abortions, contraception and other care, said Dr. Meg Autry, an obstetrician and gynecologist and a professor at the University of California San Francisco.

“There’s been an assault on reproductive rights in our country and I’m a lifelong advocate for reproductive health and choice. We have to create options and be thoughtful and creative to help people in restrictive states get the health care they deserve,” she told The Associated Press.

Autry said the idea is only in the fundraising stage through the non-profit, “PRROWESS” — short for “Protecting Reproductive Rights Of Women Endangered by State Statutes.”

So, that’s it for me.  I’m going to go see if the social workers and the health department showed up yet to offer help out to the hundreds of homeless living on that base. See you tomorrow for the hearings!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?