Thursday Reads: January 6 Investigations

Good Afternoon!!

By Sophus Vermehren

There is quite a bit of January 6 investigation news this morning, so I’m going to focus on that in today’s post. Here’s what’s happening:

Late last night, The New York Times published this interesting story by Alan Feuer, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner: Alex Jones Reaches Out to Justice Dept. About Jan. 6 Interview.

Painting by Sophia Oshodin

In the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol building, the two top Republicans in Congress, Representative Kevin McCarthy and Senator Mitch McConnell, told associates they believed President Trump was responsible for inciting the deadly riot and vowed to drive him from politics. Mr. McCarthy went so far as to say he would push Mr. Trump to resign immediately: “I’ve had it with this guy,” he told a group of Republican leaders.

But within weeks both men backed off an all-out fight with Mr. Trump because they feared retribution from him and his political movement. Their drive to act faded fast as it became clear it would mean difficult votes that would put them at odds with most of their colleagues.

“I didn’t get to be leader by voting with five people in the conference,” Mr. McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, told a friend.

The confidential expressions of outrage from Mr. McCarthy and Mr. McConnell, which have not been previously reported, illustrate the immense gulf between what Republican leaders say privately about Mr. Trump and their public deference to a man whose hold on the party has gone virtually unchallenged for half a decade.

The leaders’ swift retreat in January 2021 represented a capitulation at a moment of extraordinary political weakness for Mr. Trump — perhaps the last and best chance for mainstream Republicans to reclaim control of their party from a leader who had stoked an insurrection against American democracy itself.

Read the rest at the NYT link above.

Adam Kinzinger says it’s true.

At the Washington Post, Philip Bump responds to the NYT story: One last time before he left office, the GOP base had Trump’s back.

There are no atheists in foxholes, they say, and as the riot unfolded at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, there was similarly no questioning of the higher power at work.

A bevy of Republican officials and figures in Donald Trump’s extended sphere of supplication reached out to the White House to try to persuade the president to take a firm stance against the violence. Most didn’t reach Trump directly, but even those who did clearly didn’t have much of an effect. In one widely reported example, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) implored Trump to demand that the rioters stand down, prompting Trump reportedly to reply, “I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”

McCarthy, at direct risk from the violence, was understandably infuriated. New reporting from the New York Times reveals just how angry he was — and how, for one final time in Trump’s presidency, frustration with Trump was dampened by enthusiasm from the president’s base.

From the first weeks after Trump declared his candidacy in 2015, the Republican establishment went through a repeating pattern. Frustration at Trump’s comments or behavior, an assumption that it would damage him politically, perhaps even irreparably — only to learn that Republican voters didn’t care and sided with Trump….

Jeanne reading, Camille Pissarro, 1899

The best way to track the evolution is by walking through what was said publicly and privately, a day at a time — and comparing it with what public polling showed about the views of the Republican voting base.

In the weeks before Jan. 6, support for Trump was already softening among Republican voters. YouGov, conducting weekly polling for the Economist, measured Trump’s favorability (a metric evaluating Trump personally, not his presidency) as slipping slightly. In the weeks before the election, three-quarters of Republicans viewed him very favorably, a figure that dropped to two-thirds immediately before the riot. We’d seen this before; when Republicans lost the House in 2018, Trump — the guy who pledged that the GOP would get tired of winning — saw his approval ratings slip. Perhaps the same effect was at play here, or perhaps Trump’s refusal to submit to reality was beginning to fatigue his supporters. It’s hard to know.

Then Jan. 6 happened, and Trump took a hit among Republicans. But that was it.

Read more of Bump’s analysis at the WaPo.

At Politico, Kyle Cheney and Betsy Woodruff Swan write about the January 6 committee’s investigation in Trump’s last ditch efforts to put pressure on Mike Pence to overturn the election: Jan. 6 panel piecing together details of final Trump-Pence call.

Congressional investigators entering the last stage of their probe are gathering new evidence about a crucial moment on the Jan. 6 timeline: the final, fateful phone call between Donald Trump and Mike Pence before a pro-Trump mob attacked the Capitol.

They’ve had a lot of success on that front — court records and Jan. 6 select committee documents reveal that the panel has obtained significant details about that call. In recent weeks, they’ve learned even more from several high-profile witnesses who were in the Oval Office while Trump berated Pence for refusing to overturn the election.

Yet one crucial gap remains. Top Pence aides say the former vice president was in his residence when the call came in. He then left the room and was out of earshot for 15 to 20 minutes. Those aides told the select committee that Pence never disclosed to them the contents of the conversation. More importantly, Pence’s aides say he never revealed how he replied to Trump’s intense last-minute pressure.

Seated Closer to the Light, Black Girl Reading, by Irina-Sztukowski

That gap of information looms as the House panel works to finalize a minute-by-minute account of Trump’s actions on Jan. 6, when he pushed Pence to prevent the transfer of power to Biden. Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) has remained publicly undecided about whether to seek testimony from Pence himself, noting that Pence’s closest advisers have cooperated fulsomely. But investigators must also confront whether Pence’s side of that conversation — for which no Pence advisers were present — is significant enough to ask him to fill in the blanks.

It’s unlikely the committee will attempt to force Pence to testify. There are imposing legal obstacles for subpoenaing a former vice president, and the panel considers Pence a witness, not a target of their probe. Whether they ask for his voluntary help is another question.

An hour after the call, Pence would publicly declare what he’d privately told Trump for weeks: He would not assert unprecedented power to overturn the election.

Mike Lee is finally talking about his efforts to help Trump prove the existence of election fraud in the 2020 election following the failure of his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory on January 6. Deseret News: ‘I was not there to do his bidding’: Sen. Mike Lee breaks his silence about White House text messages.

Sen. Mike Lee says the text messages he sent to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows after the 2020 election don’t signal advocacy for overturning the results in favor of Donald Trump.

In his first interview since CNN last week revealed dozens of his texts to Meadows, the Utah Republican told the Deseret News on Wednesday his only goal was to figure out Congress’ role in a presidential election and sort through theories the Trump campaign pursued to challenge the outcome.

Lee said he has known Meadows for a long time and characterized his texts from Nov. 7, 2020, to Jan. 4, 2021, as having a level of informality that would be reserved for a friend.

“He knows that when I said things like ‘Tell me what we ought to be saying,’ what I was just trying to figure out was ‘What is your message?’ He knows me well enough to know that that doesn’t mean I will do your bidding, whatever it is,” Lee said in a 45-minute phone interview.

“Conversations I had with him at the time on the phone and in person, he knew that. He knew I was not there to do his bidding,” Lee said of his conversations with Meadows.

Lee said his texts to Meadows are being used out of context for “political motives” and were “leaked” during an important period of time in his reelection campaign. The messages were obtained by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and reviewed by CNN.

Sounds like ass covering to me.

Woman Reading on the Bench, by Pierre-Auguste Renoir

One more from The Guardian: January 6 ‘was a coup organized by the president’, says Jamie Raskin. Raskin suggests that public hearings are coming soon.

Donald Trump attempted a coup on 6 January 2021 as he tried to salvage his doomed presidency, and that will be a central focus of forthcoming public hearings of the special House panel investigating events surrounding the insurrection at the US Capitol, the congressman Jamie Raskin has said.

Raskin is a prominent Democrat on the committee and also led the House efforts when Trump was impeached for a historic second time, in 2021, accused of inciting the storming of the US Capitol by his extremist supporters who were trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.

“This was a coup organized by the president against the vice-president and against the Congress in order to overturn the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in an interview with the Guardian, Reuters news agency and the Climate One radio program.

Public hearings by the bipartisan special committee investigating January 6 and related actions by Trump and his White House team and other allies, chaired by the Mississippi Democrat Bennie Thompson, are expected next month.

“We’re going to tell the whole story of everything that happened. There was a violent insurrection and an attempted coup and we were saved by Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with that plan,” said Raskin.

So big things are happening in the committee and DOJ. Now if Congressional Democrats would start speaking out and calling out their GOP colleagues, we might have a chance to save democracy in 2022 and 2024,

What else is happening? What stories have caught your interest today?

Tuesday Reads: Just the Latest News

Good Morning!!

There was a mass shooting inside a subway station in New York this morning. Five people were shot and thirteen were injured. There also were IED’s found that didn’t detonate. The suspect was wearing a gas mask and some type of construction worker’s vest.

The New York Times: Live Updates: Several People Are Shot at Brooklyn Subway Station.

Multiple people were shot in the subway system in Brooklyn during the Tuesday morning rush, officials said, a violent episode that came amid fears about public safety as New York City struggles to recover from the pandemic.

Police officers were called to the 36th Street station, where the D, N and Rlines pass through the Sunset Park neighborhood, around 8:30 a.m., the Police Department said. The Fire Department said that 13 people were injured, several by gunfire. Police officials said that preliminary reports suggested that five people were shot.

A senior law enforcement official said that the police were seeking a heavyset man with a gas mask and an orange construction vest who had been wearing a dark blue outfit that appeared to resemble that of a transit worker.

The official said that investigators believed that a smoke bomb went off and that the gunman had shot from inside a subway train. Videos posted on social media showed panicked riders pouring from a train and onto a platform at 36th Street as smoke billowed through the station.

The shooting happened just a short time ago, so there will be updates coming.

Ukraine news

There are reports of possible chemical weapons used in Mariupol. BBC: Ukraine War: US ‘deeply concerned’ at report of Mariupol chemical attack.

AP News: Putin vows Russia will press Ukraine invasion till goals met.

President Vladimir Putin vowed Tuesday that Russia’s bloody offensive in Ukraine would continue until its goals are fulfilled, and insisted the campaign was going as planned, despite a major withdrawal in the face of stiff Ukrainian opposition and significant losses.

Russian troops, thwarted in their push toward Ukraine’s capital, are now focusing on the eastern Donbas region, where Ukraine said Tuesday it was investigating a claim that a poisonous substance had been dropped on its troops. It was not clear what the substance might be, but Western officials warned that any use of chemical weapons by Russia would be a serious escalation of the already devastating war.

Russia invaded on Feb. 24, with the goal, according to Western officials, of taking Kyiv, toppling the government and installing a Moscow-friendly one. In the six weeks since, Russia’s ground campaign stalled, its forces suffered losses that may number in the thousands and it stands accused of killing civilians and other atrocities.

Putin insisted Tuesday that his military action aimed to protect people in areas in eastern Ukraine controlled by Moscow-backed rebels and to “ensure Russia’s own security.”

He said Russia “had no other choice” but to launch what he calls a “special military operation,” and vowed it would “continue until its full completion and the fulfillment of the tasks that have been set.”

The article says that the Russian forces are hoping he will get popular support from Ukrainians when he attacks the Donbas region.

Video of kids near Kyiv:

The Guardian: Russia ‘using weapons smuggled by Iran from Iraq against Ukraine’

Russia is receiving munitions and military hardware sourced from Iraq for its war effort in Ukraine with the help of Iranian weapons smuggling networks, according to members of Iranian-backed Iraqi militias and regional intelligence services with knowledge of the process.

RPGs and anti-tank missiles, as well as Brazilian-designed rocket launcher systems, have been dispatched to Russia from Iraq as Moscow’s campaign has faltered in the last month, the Guardian has learned.

An Iranian-made Bavar 373 missile system, similar to the Russian S-300, has also been donated to Moscow by the authorities in Tehran, who also returned an S-300, according to a source who helped organise the transport.

Using the weapons-trafficking underworld would signal a dramatic shift in Russian strategy, as Moscow is forced to lean on Iran, its military ally in Syria, following new sanctions triggered by the invasion of Ukraine.

The developments also have huge implications for the direction and volume of trade in the international weapons trafficking business.

Iraq has hosted US and western troops since the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the US has trained and supplied various Iraqi army and special forces units to defend the Baghdad government against insurgencies. After two decades of war, the country is awash with weaponry.

From the WaPo article:

Thousands of Russian battlefield deaths. Three front-line retreats by the Russian military. Millions of Ukrainians who will never forgive Moscow. More isolation than ever — and perilously few goals achieved.

Putin is now regrouping to focus his military campaign on Ukraine’s east in what is widely seen as “Plan B,” after his forces failed to topple Ukraine’s government or wrest control of its biggest cities. All the while, questions are mounting about how a Russian leader steeped in security policy and known for railing against the folly of regime-change wars could have sleepwalked into a such a strategic morass.

At issue is a broader quandary that will occupy historians for years: How could Russia — a country with such deep familial, cultural and historic ties to its western neighbor — get Ukraine so wrong?

Officials in the United States and Europe are piecing together the answer to that question. What emerges, those officials say, is a picture of a hubristic and isolated leader, beset by biases and skewed information, pressing forward with a calamitous decision without consulting his full cohort of advisers. Putin rushed headlong into Ukraine, confident in his ability to secure a quick victory and weather any blowback within the authoritarian system he erected at home, they said. Underpinning his assumptions: misconceptions about Ukraine fundamentally rooted in Moscow’s colonial past.

“Historically, there just hasn’t been expertise on Ukraine in Russia at all,” said Alina Polyakova, president and CEO of the Washington-based Center for European Policy Analysis. “When you don’t believe a country’s a real country and a people’s a real people, why would you invest any expertise in a thing you don’t think exists?”

Read the rest of this interesting piece at the WaPo.

Right wing crazy stories

Grid News: QAnon candidates are on the ballot in 26 states.

Dozens of politicians running for state or federal office are aligning themselves with the right-wing, conspiracy-rich, sometimes-violent movement known as QAnon. They’re drawing tens of millions of dollars in donations as the movement’s popularity stays strong among voters, a Grid investigation has found.

And despite the movement’s penchant for lies and violence, key Republicans — from influential megadonors to prominent elected officials — are welcoming the QAnon movement into the party, Grid found. In sum: QAnon appears to be a growing political movement with increasing clout and significant mainstream appeal.

Grid reviewed public records and reporting, social media posts, and campaign materials and events to identify and confirm at least 78 QAnon-aligned candidates running for office in 26 states in 2022. They’re running for governorships, secretaries of state, seats in the Senate and House, and in state legislatures. They have raised over $20 million this cycle — and over $30 million since 2018.

David Reinert holds up a large “Q” sign while waiting in line to see President Donald J. Trump at his rally on August 2, 2018 at the Mohegan Sun Arena at Casey Plaza in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.

All but six of the QAnon-aligned candidates Grid examined are Republican. Over a dozen are incumbents: Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) and Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) serve in the House of Representatives, while another 14 serve at the state level, mostly legislatures. Most are running against fellow Republicans in primaries, which will take place throughout the spring and summer.

Arizona has the highest number of QAnon-aligned candidates running in 2022, at 13. Other states with high numbers of QAnon candidates include Florida (12), California (10) and Texas (six)….

While some Republican elites were circumspect about aligning themselves explicitly with the movement, their reluctance has ebbed as the popularity of QAnon’s theories have grown.

QAnon candidates receive support from GOP megadonors like Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, casino mogul Steve Wynn and San Francisco Giants owner Charles Johnson, as well as from party-affiliated fundraising machines. They have enjoyed exposure on right-wing outlets from Fox News to OANN. The movement’s causes and themes are echoed by prominent elected officials like Republican Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.), and by former president Donald Trump himself.

Which raises a related riddle: What to call the influx of QAnon messages and candidates into the political mainstream? The movement has no apparent party structure or central organization, yet it appears stronger than any third party. The community doesn’t appear to have a candidate recruitment strategy but fielded dozens of federal and state candidates in over half of U.S. states this cycle.

There’s much more at the link. This is part one of a two-part investigation.

The Daily Beast: Tucker Carlson Brags to Megachurch That He Is Totally Unvaccinated.

For more than a year now, Fox News star Tucker Carlsonhas gone out of his way to avoid confirming whether or not he’s vaccinated. This month, however, he bragged about having not gotten a single jab.

While speaking at Awaken Church earlier this month, the primetime star heaped praise on the San Diego megachurch for defying COVID-19 restrictions throughout the pandemic before mocking the need for additional booster shots.

“I skipped the first three, I’m not getting that one either,” Carlson said, to rapturous applause from the crowd, Voice of San Diego first reported.

Additional audio provided to Source Material by the nonprofit investigative outfit confirmed Carlson’s remarks, which further included him citing his having grown up “next to the Salk Institute in La Jolla” as evidence that he is “obviously” not opposed to vaccines.

“I’ve had like a million of them,” he said, but regarding the COVID shots, Carlson added of its proponents: “I look at these people, like, this just does not make sense at all. And I have no idea what’s up here, but whatever you’re telling me it’s just not true.”

The loudest anti-vax voice among a plethora of Fox News cranks, Carlson had repeatedly leaned on privacy rights to justify not providing his vax status when asked. “When was the last time you had sex with your wife and in what position? We can trade intimate details,” Carlson texted The New York Times last year when asked.

Supposedly Fox News requires all its employees to be vaccinated. I’m waiting to see what Carlson’s bosses have to say about this.

Gender controversy

This is an interesting story from The Washington Post by a transwoman who now realizes that at 19 when he struggled with gender dysphoria and had surgery, he was actually just a gay man attracted to other men. Corrina Cohn: Opinion: What I wish I’d known when I was 19 and had sex reassignment surgery.

When I was 19, I had surgery for sex reassignment, or what is now called gender affirmation surgery. The callow young man who was obsessed with transitioning to womanhood could not have imagined reaching middle age. But now I’m closer to 50, keeping a watchful eye on my 401(k), and dieting and exercising in the hope that I’ll have a healthy retirement.

In terms of my priorities and interests today, that younger incarnation of myself might as well have been a different person — yet that was the person who committed me to a lifetime set apart from my peers.

There is much debate today about transgender treatment, especially for young people. Others might feel differently about their choices, but I know now that I wasn’t old enough to make that decision. Given the strong cultural forces today casting a benign light on these matters, I thought it might be helpful for young people, and their parents, to hear what I wish I had known.

I once believed that I would be more successful finding love as a woman than as a man, but in truth, few straight men are interested in having a physical relationship with a person who was born the same sex as them. In high school, when I experienced crushes on my male classmates, I believed that the only way those feelings could be requited was if I altered my body.

It turned out that several of those crushes were also gay. If I had confessed my interest, what might have developed? Alas, the rampant homophobia in my school during the AIDS crisis smothered any such notions. Today, I have resigned myself to never finding a partner. That’s tough to admit, but it’s the healthiest thing I can do.

As a teenager, I was repelled by the thought of having biological children, but in my vision of the adult future, I imagined marrying a man and adopting a child. It was easy to sacrifice my ability to reproduce in pursuit of fulfilling my dream. Years later, I was surprised by the pangs I felt as my friends and younger sister started families of their own.

Sadly, because of his early decision, Cohn is sterile and apparently unable to enjoy sex.