Bowes, Josephine; Study of Birch Trees; The Bowes Museum.
Good Morning!!
Today’s January 6 Committee hearing has now been scheduled for 1PM. As you know, the hearing will focus on Trump’s efforts to pressure state lawmakers to set up slates of fake electors. It could be a blockbuster. Politico just broke the news that Ginni Thomas’s communications with Arizona lawmakers could come up in the questioning.
The logistics … Chair BENNIE THOMPSON (D-Miss.) and Vice Chair LIZ CHENEY (R-Wyo.) are expected to open the hearing, and Rep. ADAM SCHIFF (D-Calif.) will play a key role. There will be four witnesses broken up over two panels.
— The first panel features (1) Arizona House Speaker RUSTY BOWERS, (2) Georgia Secretary of State BRAD RAFFENSPERGER and (3) his deputy, GABRIEL STERLING.
Bowers is expected to describe the pressure campaign from Trump, RUDY GIULIANI and VIRGINIA THOMAS, the wife of Supreme Court Justice CLARENCE THOMAS. In one phone call, Trump and Giuliani pushed Bowers to change Arizona law retroactively “to allow the Legislature to choose a different slate of presidential electors than picked by voters.”
And the Playbook also broke this news this morning:
SCOOP: The House select committee investigating Jan. 6 sent a subpoena last week to ALEX HOLDER, a documentary filmmaker who was granted extensive access to President DONALD TRUMP and his inner circle, and who shot interviews with the then-president both before and after Jan. 6. The existence of this footage is previously unreported.
Landscape with trees, Felix Edouard Vallotton
A source familiar with the project told Playbook on Monday night that Holder began filming on the campaign trail in September 2020 for a project on Trump’s reelection campaign. Over the course of several months, Holder had substantial access to Trump, Trump’s adult children and VP MIKE PENCE, both in the White House and on the campaign trail.
According to the subpoena, which was obtained exclusively by Playbook, the committee wants three main things from Holder:
(1) Raw footage from Jan. 6.
(2) Raw footage of interviews from September 2020 to present with Trump, Pence, DONALD TRUMP JR., IVANKA TRUMP, ERIC TRUMP and JARED KUSHNER.
(3) Raw footage “pertaining to discussions of election fraud or election integrity surrounding the November 2020 presidential election.”
Holder is expected to fully cooperate with the committee in an interview scheduled for Thursday. Read the full subpoena
The second panel will focus on an election worker from Georgia:
— The second panel has just one witness: SHAYE MOSS, an election worker in Georgia. She and her mother processed ballots in 2020 and were targets of a smear campaign by Trump allies. David Wickert at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution has a deep dive on Moss, who was accused “of rigging the November 2020 election for Joe Biden with ‘suitcases’ of ballots on election night. The pair were featured in a video that Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani called a ‘smoking gun’ for voting fraud.”
A committee aide said that Moss would outline how “being targeted by the former president has upended her life and that of her mother. … They were subjected to death threats, intimidation, coercion, forced to go into hiding.”
Raffensperger and Sterling are relatively well known now, but I had not heard of Rusty Bowers before. Here’s some information about him from The Washington Post: Who is Rusty Bowers?
Arizona House Speaker Russell “Rusty” Bowers, a Republican, was pressured by Donald Trump and other members of his party to refuse to accept the results of Arizona’s election in 2020. Bowers is expected to be Tuesday’s first live witness before the Jan. 6 panel.
Vickerman, Stanley; Tree Roots; Kirklees Museums and Galleries
Bowers, 69, supported Trump’s 2020 campaign. When the former president lost the election in Arizona by 10,457 votes, he and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Bowers to persuade him to block the state legislature from certifying the results.
Bowers refused.
His decision to stand firm against Trump put him at the center of the ire of the former president’s supporters. Armed protesters gathered outside his house and screamed that he was a pedophile. Last summer, the state’s right-wing Patriot Party attempted to recall Bowers from office, complaining that he did not do enough to support an audit of the 2020 election. The effort failed, the Arizona Republic reported.
The state lawmaker, who will not be in charge of the Arizona House next year — he decided to seek a state Senate seat instead — received the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award in April for resisting intimidation from Trump.
The select committee intends to lay out Tuesday how Trump leaned on statehouse Republicans — from Pennsylvania, to Georgia, to Michigan, to Arizona and others — to pull off a scheme that would culminate on Jan. 6, 2021, when then-Vice President Mike Pence presided over the counting of electoral votes.
Under Trump’s plan, Pence would be presented with competing slates of electors — those certified by the governors, and those certified by state legislators — and he would assert the extraordinary power to choose which slates to count. But no state legislature responded to Trump’s demand, and Pence, without any genuine controversy, rejected the scheme as illegal.
In fact, the legality of the plan will be at the heart of Tuesday afternoon’s hearing, which will be led in part by panel member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). It’s the select panel’s fourth public hearing as investigators lay out their findings.
Dancing around the large trees at Perros Maurice Denis – 1914, Bo Fransson
Trump-aligned lawyers concocted the effort, leaning on fringe constitutional theory and the guidance of John Eastman, a primary architect of the effort to pressure Pence on Jan. 6. Eastman himself acknowledged in emails obtained by the select committee that the Pence plan would be “dead on arrival” without the backing of state legislatures — yet he pushed ahead anyway, suggesting that the confusion around alternate electors would give Pence enough cover to act.
Trump’s own White House counsel’s office also raised doubts about the plan, according to testimony released by the select panel in court filings. And in the days before Jan. 6, Pence’s chief counsel Greg Jacob engaged in an intense debate with Eastman, contending that not a single justice of the Supreme Court would back his plan — a point he said Eastman reluctantly conceded.
Select committee aides told reporters Monday that the hearing would highlight new evidence of Trump’s direct awareness and involvement in the fake electors scheme. To highlight the issue, the panel plans to hear from Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his aide Gabriel Sterling and other state and local officials. Several of Tuesday’s witnesses were subpoenaed to appear. Schiff told the Los Angeles Times Monday the panel would also highlight proof of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’ involvement in Georgia.
The convening of the electoral college on Dec. 14, 2020, was supposed to mark the end of the wild, extended presidential election that year.
But when the dayarrived, a strange thing happened. In seven swing states won by JoeBiden, when the Democrat’s electors assembled to formally elect him president, Trump supporters showed up, too, ready to declare that their man had actually won.
“The electors are already here — they’ve been checked in,” a state police officer told the group in Michigan, according to a video of the encounter, as he barred the Republicans from the Capitol in a state Biden won by more than 154,000 votes.
In Nevada,a state Biden had won by about 33,600 votes,a photo distributed by the state Republican Party showed Trump supporters squeezing around an undersize picnic table dressed up with a bit of bunting, preparing to sign formal certificates declaring that they were “the duly elected and qualified” electors of their state.
Ellison, R.; Oak Trees; Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service
At the time, the gatherings seemed a slapdash, desperate attempt to mimic President Donald Trump’s refusal to concede.
But internal campaign emails and memos revealthat the convening of the fake electors was apparently a much more concerted strategy, intended to give Vice President Mike Pence a reason to declare that the outcome of the election was somehow in doubt on Jan. 6, 2021, when he was to preside over the congressional counting of the electoral college votes.
The documents show that Trump’s team pushed ahead and urged the electors to meet — then pressured Pence to cite the alternate Trump slates — even as various Trump lawyers acknowledged privately that they did not have legal validity and the gatherings had not been in compliance with state laws.
The House Jan. 6 committee plans to show in its fourth hearing Tuesday that President Trump’s then-chief of staff Mark Meadows “had an intimate role … in this plot to put pressure on [Georgia] state legislators and on elections officials,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the panel, told The Times in an interview.
Among other things, Schiff said the committee investigating the 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol will release new information about Meadows’ appearance at a key election meeting in Georgia and text messages revealing that he wanted to send autographed Make America Great Again hats to people conducting the audit….
In the interview, Schiff, a former prosecutor, expressed surprise that the House committee got so many people to speak on the record.
“I’m glad these people are coming forward,” he said. “I’m glad they’re speaking out. It took a long time for [former Atty. Gen.] Bill Barr to do the right thing. It took a long time for many others who enabled Donald Trump to say ‘I can’t go any further.’”
But he added, if they had spoken out earlier, “we might have been spared all the trauma we went through.”
Bough, Samuel; Entrance to Cadzow Forest, near Glasgow; York Museums Trust.
Two months after rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to help President Donald Trump stay in office, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, attended a gathering of right-wing activists where a speaker declared to roaring applause that Trump was still the “legitimate president,” a video recording of the event shows.
“There is a robbery that is going on in this country right now,” pastor and conservative radio personality C.L. Bryant told the crowd, according to video posted to Facebook by an attendee. “In fact, I say it to you and I’ll say it loud and clear, and I’m not ashamed to say it. I won’t bite my tongue. I do believe that Donald John Trump is the only legitimate president.”
The event on March 6, 2021, was a meeting of Frontliners for Liberty. The group vaulted from obscurity to national attention last week with the disclosure that Thomas had invited pro-Trump lawyer John Eastman to speak to its members in December 2020.
The revelation, originating from emails that a judge ordered Eastman to turn over to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection, showed that Thomas was in contact with Eastman, a key legal architect of the attempt to subvert the election. The judge, David O. Carter of the Central District of California, wrote in a June 7 opinion that the emails, including two in which the group’s “high-profile leader” invited Eastman to speak — were relevant to the committee’s work.
While text messages and emails unearthed in recent weeks have shown that Thomas was involved in those efforts before Jan. 6, her attendance at the Orlando gathering indicates that her alliance with election deniers continued even after Joe Biden was inaugurated. Frontliners has hosted hard-right lawmakers, insisted on strict secrecy and proclaimed that the nation’s top enemy is the “radical fascist left,” according to social media posts, court filings and interviews with several people involved in the group.
I can’t wait for 1:00! If you’re watching the hearing, please share your thoughts in the comment thread.
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Today we recognize our newest national holiday! I’m still hoping we kick Colombus Day to the curb and replace it with one that celebrates our Indigenous peoples rather than that mass murderer that even his enablers eventually refused to pay for his horrifying time somewhere in the Caribbean. He was an enslaver and rapist.
Dating back millennia, the Jubilee was a momentous celebration, a year when land was to be returned, debts forgiven, and enslaved people were to be set free. Announced by the loud blast of a ram’s horn, biblical scholars note, the Jubilee year was grounded in the idea of freedom, orchestrating an economic, cultural, and moral reordering of society. It’s fitting, then, that Juneteenth is often referred to as Jubilee Day.
In January 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation abolished chattel slavery, declaring “all persons held as slaves” to be “forever free.” But it wasn’t until two years later, on June 19, 1865, that news of liberation finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Texas. Juneteenth, sometimes called Black Independence Day or Freedom Day, honors this actual ending of slavery.
In a way, the Emancipation Proclamation functioned as Black Americans’ first and only Jubilee — in fact, “Jubilee” is what formerly enslaved people called the phase that followed the Civil War. Abolition put an end to an entire economy of exploited labor that essentially built the modern capitalist world. But the Emancipation Proclamation went further than requiring Confederate states to simply recognize slavery’s abolition — it also instructed the United States government to “maintain” the freedom of formerly enslaved people, and to do “no act or acts to repress such persons” or any “efforts they may make for their actual freedom.” Today, in a stark deviation from President Abraham Lincoln’s instructions, the government is still sanctioning and facilitating the oppression of Black people.
Last June, President Biden made Juneteenth a federal holiday, proclaiming it as a day for all Americans to commemorate the end of slavery.
One year later, only 24 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation or issued executive orders that would provide funding to let state employees observe the day as a paid state holiday, according to the Pew Research Center, which describes itself as “a nonpartisan fact tank.”
For supporters, such arguments are painful to hear, especially as more Americans said they were familiar with Juneteenth. In June 2022, nearly 60 percent of Americans said they knew about the holiday, compared with 37 percent in May 2021, according to a Gallup poll.
“This is something that Black folk deserve and it was like we had to almost prove ourselves to get them to agree,” said Anthony Nolan, a state representative in Connecticut, where legislators argued for hours earlier this year before passing legislation to fund the holiday.
Juneteenth commemorates the events of June 19, 1865, when Gordon Granger, a Union general, arrived in Galveston, Texas, to inform enslaved African Americans of their freedom after the Civil War had ended.
The day has been commemorated by Black Americans since the late 1800s. Though all 50 states have recognized Juneteenth by enacting some kind of proclamation celebrating it, its full adoption as an American holiday has yet to take root.
You can read about Republican resistance to the holiday in the rest of the article. It’s disgusting as expected.
Juneteenth is a day of power—a chance to celebrate our history and our triumphs, our resilience and our struggle.
It would be nice to think the traditional application of American Freedom, Justice, and Liberty for all was at the center of our attention rather than the white nationalist paranoia that is driving what’s left of the Republican Party.
A Republican member of the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol said on Sunday that he believes Donald Trump’s actions surrounding the deadly riots amount to “seditious conspiracy” and “criminal involvement by a president”.
Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger’s remarks on ABC’s This Week came after three hearings held by the House January 6 committee presented searing testimony and mounting evidence about Trump’s central role in a complex plot to overturn his defeat at the hands of Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election.
While he was only one of at least four committee members scheduled to appear on the national news network’s Sunday talkshows, Kinzinger’s comments stood out for their candor and because they came from within the ex-president’s own political party.
“I certainly think the president is guilty of knowing what he did, seditious conspiracy, being involved in … pressuring the [justice department], vice-president [Mike Pence], et cetera,” Kinzinger said. “Obviously, you know, we’re not a criminal charges committee, so I want to be careful in specifically using that language, but I think what we’re presenting before the American people certainly would rise to a level of criminal involvement by a president.”
Kinzinger also said that Trump’s actions, as portrayed by the committee, show he “definitely” failed to maintain his oath to uphold the US constitution.
“The oath has to matter here,” Kinzinger said. “Your personal demand to stand for the constitution has to matter.”
What Juneteenth Means to Me: a Photo Essay The BU community’s reflections on the holiday’s significance: “Juneteenth, for me… is equal parts celebration and remembrance”
Republicans in Texas formally rejected President Joe Biden’s election in 2020 as illegitimate and voted in a state-wide convention that wrapped up this weekend on a party platform that calls homosexuality an “abnormal lifestyle choice.”
The party’s embrace of unfounded electoral fraud allegations in a bedrock Republican state came as a bipartisan congressional committee seeks to definitively and publicly debunk the false idea that Biden did not win the election.
Biden received 7 million more votes than rival Donald Trump. Biden also received 306 votes from the Electoral College, more than the 270 needed to win.
The congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol is building a case that Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election — including by denying he lost — amounted to conspiracy to illegally hold onto power.
Trump, the 45th U.S. president, has denied any wrongdoing.
“We reject the certified results of the 2020 presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” the Texas party said in a resolution, passed in a voice vote at its convention.
Texas is a major player in U.S. national politics, with 38 electoral votes, the second highest after California. Voters there have backed Republican presidents for the past four decades.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said Sunday he is “very worried” about the next presidential election, warning that 2024 “is going to be a mess,” citing a recent example of voting conspiracy theories taking hold.
Speaking to ABC’s “This Week,” Kinzinger mentioned New Mexico, where a GOP-led county’s governing commission refused to certify the local election results because of unsubstantiated concerns over voting machines before a judge stepped in.
The case echoes voting conspiracy theories in the 2020 election when right-wing personalities and networks accused voting software companies of using technology to skew the election in favor of Joe Biden.
“This is the untold thing. We focused so much on what goes on in D.C. and Congress and the Senate,” Kinzinger said. “But when you have these election judges that are going to people that don’t believe basically in democracy, authoritarians, 2024 is going to be a mess.”
“And wake up, America. Wake up, Republicans, because this is not going to be good for you if you think it is,” Kinzinger continued.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection has reportedly argued over whether to refer Trump to the Department of Justice for criminal charges over his efforts in overturning the results of the 2020 election.
The next public hearing will be tomorrow. It will center on Trump’s interference in state elections including Georgia.
Two top Georgia election officials will appear Tuesday at the next hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
Their appearances underscore the outsized role Georgia has played in these public hearings: https://t.co/z6vLmsggbt
So, I’ll leave you to picnic and celebrate one of our Country’s finest moments, President Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Declaration. Tomorrow we restart our path of dealing with our Country’s worst President and the cult and racists that define one of our Country’s worst moments.
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Poppy Flowers / Vase And Flowers, Van Gogh, 1887 stolen from Mahmoud Khalil museum in 2010 for the second time.
Good Day Sky Dancers!
Well, it’s been a wild ride this week with public hearings from the January 6th Committee, insane weather, and just general mayhem and running amok, amok, amok.
The malice of those in the crowd toward Pence, the holier-than-thou evangelical Christian who had spent the previous four years as Donald Trump’s slavishly loyal sidekick, was remarkable.
“If Pence caved we’re going to drag motherfuckers through the streets,” one rioter was captured on video saying. “He deserves to burn with the rest of them,” another said. A man with a bullhorn agitated the crowd. “Mike Pence has betrayed the United States of America,” he informed the already agitated mob. “Mike Pence has betrayed this President.” He finished with a threat and a promise: “We will never, ever forget.”
The explosive ending of the Trump Presidency has always been a story about the rift between Trump and Pence—two of the most mismatched figures ever to be thrown into a marriage of political convenience. For four years, Trump had tested and tried his sanctimonious No. 2, but Pence never broke. Not in public, not, as far as we can tell, in private, either. He was famous during the Trump years for doing and saying almost nothing that would make news. When he debated Kamala Harris during the 2020 campaign, his most memorable moment was when a fly landed on his impeccably coiffed white hair and he did not react for the full two minutes that it sat on his head.
But on January 6th, Pence finally did break with Trump, refusing to go along with the President’s absurd, illegal, and unconstitutional plot to have his Vice-President single-handedly overturn the will of the American people and block Congress’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory. On Thursday, the House committee devoted its hearing to attempting to explain Trump’s scheme to pressure Pence—which unfolded in a series of inflammatory Presidential tweets, angry phone calls, and bizarre White House meetings that were a mix of constitutional-law seminars and live reënactments of “The Godfather.” The committee introduced a new villain to a national television audience: John Eastman, the former law professor who concocted the absurd legal theory that Pence could unilaterally overturn the election—a concocted counterpart to what U.S. District Judge David Carter recently skewered as “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
As the House committee investigating the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol focused almost entirely Thursday on the role Mike Pence played in averting a constitutional crisis, the former vice president was far from Washington.
Rather than watch the hearing, Mr. Pence was in Ohio, campaigning for Gov. Mike DeWine and a Republican congressman—the latest step in a carefully managed re-emergence onto the national political scene as he appears to lay the groundwork for a 2024 presidential campaign.
“Ultimately, I believe that most Americans understand that we did our duty that day under the Constitution and the laws of this country,” Mr. Pence said in an interview of his actions on Jan. 6, when he rebuffed pressure from then-President Donald Trump to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden.
It was the most visible break Mr. Pence displayed after four years of loyalty to Mr. Trump. Committee members said the president’s resulting actions helped trigger an attack that included calls for the vice president’s hanging.
Mr. Pence, nonetheless, indicated he isn’t interested in relitigating the 2020 election as Mr. Trump has since he lost, to the frustration of some GOP leaders.
“Everywhere I go across the country, I can tell you, the American people are hurting,” he said Thursday. “Inflation is at a 40-year high, $5-a-gallon gas and higher, the crisis at our border that I saw firsthand on Monday. A crime wave impacting our cities. It’s one of the reasons I’m so determined to be out supporting candidates for the House, the Senate and governors.”
Mr. Pence’s travels illustrate the challenge he would face in another election as he grapples with the legacy of the Trump administration. Some analysts and Republican strategists question whether he could pull it off.
“The Trump base in many states is very firm and very loyal,” said Pennsylvania pollster Terry Madonna. “That’s Pence’s problem. He has to find a way to move some of those people over to him and campaign without alienating that base.”
John Eastman, the lawyer who played a key role in efforts to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election, confirmed Thursday that the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas invited him a month after the election to speak at a meeting she was helping to organize.
Eastman’s disclosure came a day after The Washington Post reported that the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol had obtained email correspondence between him and Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a conservative activist and staunch supporter of former president Donald Trump. Individuals involved in the investigation said the emails — which have not been made public — showed that Thomas’s efforts to help overturn the election were more extensive than previously known, The Post reported.
On Thursday afternoon, during a hearing largely devoted to outlining Eastman’s role in what the committee described as a scheme to steal the presidency, he posted online a copy of an email that he said Thomas sent him on Dec. 4, 2020. The email showed Thomas inviting him to speak on Dec. 8 to Frontliners, which she described as “a group of grassroots state leaders.”
In an accompanying statement posted to Substack, the online newsletter site, Eastman sought to downplay the significance of the invitation, saying Thomas had asked him to give an “update about election litigation to a group she met with periodically.”He wrote that he did not discuss with Thomas or her husband “any matters pending or likely to come before the court.”
— John (repeat1968) Buss (@repeat1968) June 17, 2022
All of the witness-to-date –except for those in the Capitol Police–have been Republican officials or lawyers that are have basically had it with The Big Lie. John Eastman continues to dither and take his 5th Amendment rights in response to questioning. From what I could tell from the testimony of others, he knew it was wrong but just couldn’t abandon Trump’s machinations. Pence never went public with his plans until the day of the insurrection which makes him complicit up to that point in my eyes. They are all weasels.
The Russians are still pounding the eastern part of Ukraine although there is some good news on some fronts. The EU membership is likely to happen.
Here is what Ursula von der Leyen said as she officially gave candidacy status to Ukraine.
The European Commission has backed Ukraine’s bid to be given candidacy status to join the EU – bringing it one step closer to joining the bloc.
“Good work has been done” by Ukraine, but more is needed, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said.
Ukraine must make “important” reforms – on rule of law, oligarchs, human rights and tackling corruption, she added.
Candidacy status is a significant step to joining the EU, however the whole process can take many years.
The recommendation from the European Commission still needs to be signed off by the EU’s 27 member states, who meet to discuss it next week. The French, German and Italian leaders have already backed Ukraine’s bid, but the decision must be unanimous.
Speaking from Brussels and wearing blue and yellow – the colours of Ukraine – Ms Von der Leyen said Ukrainians are “ready to die” for the European perspective.
“We want them to live with us in the European dream,” she said, adding that Ukraine had shown its “aspiration and determination to live up to European values and standards.”
The Washington Post continues its live updates on the conflict if you’re interested in the meeting with EU leaders or any other details of the war.
Russia-Ukraine war live updates: European Commission backs Kyiv’s E.U. ambitions; Putin claims the West wants to ‘cancel’ Russia https://t.co/grq3luvEAp The Washington Post
The best news of the week is that my almost 1-year-old granddaughters can now get either Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines. Everyone with small children in their family should be quite happy about this. Our littlest citizens will now be protected. This is from CBS News. “FDA authorizes COVID-19 vaccines for kids under 5 years old”.
The Food and Drug Administration authorized COVID-19 vaccines for children as young as 6 months old on Friday, clearing a key hurdle in expanding eligibility for the shots to 20 million babies, toddlers, and preschoolers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention must still sign off before kids under age 5 can start getting vaccinated, which could happen within days.
“Those trusted with the care of children can have confidence in the safety and effectiveness of these COVID-19 vaccines and can be assured that the agency was thorough in its evaluation of the data,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Robert Califf said in a statement announcing the move.
The FDA’s decision comes after unanimous votes of support out of a daylong meeting Wednesday of the regulator’s outside advisers, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, which weighed submissions from Moderna as well as Pfizer and its partner BioNTech.
A panel of the CDC’s own advisers, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, is scheduled to vote on Saturday. Once the CDC director formally greenlights vaccinations following the meeting, federal officials have said they expect many kids can start getting shots as soon as Tuesday, June 21.
Federal officials say most jurisdictions — except for Florida — have pre-ordered doses out of the 10 million total shots that were made available; 2.5 million orders were received for Pfizer’s shots and 1.3 million for Moderna’s.
Providers in the initial wave have ordered only one of the brands in some jurisdictions, though the Biden administration hopes that will even out as supply climbs around the country over future rounds of shipments.
The FDA also moved Friday to authorize Moderna’s vaccine for children 6 through 17 years old, after the company’s request to vaccinate these children had been stalled for months over concerns it might pose a larger risk of heart inflammation side effects in adolescents.
So, that’s a little this and that for the week! I hope you can add some more interesting things! I’m trying to escape the heat today. We may hit 100 today.
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We’re live blogging the second of the Jan. 6 Committee’s hearings today which start at 10:00 a.m. EDT.
Here’s some warm-up material to read!
This is from The New York Times: “Trump Campaign Chief to Headline Jan. 6 Hearing on Election Lies.”
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol plans to use the testimony of former President Donald J. Trump’s own campaign manager against him on Monday as it lays out evidence that Mr. Trump knowingly spread the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him in an attempt to overturn his defeat.
The committee plans to call Bill Stepien, the final chairman of Mr. Trump’s campaign, who is expected to be asked to detail what the campaign and the former president himself knew about his fictitious claims of widespread election fraud. Those claims will be the focus of the second in a series of hearings the panel is holding this month to reveal the findings of its sprawling investigation.
After an explosive first hearing last week in prime time, leaders of the committee are aiming to keep up a steady stream of revelations about the magnitude of Mr. Trump’s plot to overturn the election and how it sowed the seeds of the violent siege of the Capitol by his supporters last year.
Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and how it fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are the planned focus Monday of the second in a series of June hearings by a House select committee.
Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen and how it fueled the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are the planned focus Monday of the second in a series of June hearings by a House select committee. Panel members said they will also explore how Trump’s “big lie” drove Republican fundraising appeals after Joe Biden won the election.
Scheduled to testify before the committee on Monday are former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien; Chris Stirewalt, a former political editor for Fox News; Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer; former U.S. attorney Byung J. “BJay” Pak; and Al Schmidt, a former city commissioner of Philadelphia. The hearing is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m.
Well, the first public hearing of the January 6 Committee’s investigation of the Trump-led insurrection was broadcasted on all the major TV stations and news stations. It was a searing combination of testimony–both in person and by video–as well as a massive TV providing highlights of violence previously unseen. It was a tribute to the men and women of the Capitol Police as well as the beginning of a suggested indictment of Trump and his enablers.
The so-called Fox “News” station broadcast Tucker Carlson with his spurious version of a false-flag event made to make Republicans look like racists. Phillip Bump analyzed this pathetic attempt to rally the racists, misogynists, fascists, christofascists, and Homophobic riff-raff to rage. I’m not sure he succeeded if you read this account. I was obviously watching the public hearings. From The Washington Post: “Fox News didn’t just ignore the Jan. 6 hearing. It did something worse.”
When 8 p.m. Eastern rolled around, though, it became clear that the network wasn’t simply going to not cover the hearing. Instead, it began more than two hours of commercial-free rebuttal. It didn’t simply cover other things, it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.
Part of that was probably timing. The hearing began just as Tucker Carlson’s show kicked off, and few people in America have been more energetically engaged than Carlson in casting the Jan. 6 riot as not worthy of discussion. Or as largely innocuous, save for some vandalism. Or maybe it’s a government false flag aimed at casting Republicans as racists or something. Rhetorical consistency is not Carlson’s strength, but that is happily for him not a limitation for his job.
So Carlson began by crowing about Fox’s decision to stand apart from its competitors.
“The whole thing is insulting. In fact, it’s deranged,” Carlson said. “And we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we’re not going to help them do it.”
Yes, God forbid that Fox News should air an hour of propaganda or dishonesty. Carlson didn’t articulate the purported lies, which he couldn’t have, because the hearing hadn’t actually begun by that point. But it didn’t matter, because his audience wasn’t hearing the evidence from the hearing anyway. Was it a lie when the hearing showed William P. Barr, Trump’s ever-loyal attorney general, describing Trump’s voter-fraud claims as nonsense? Doesn’t matter, just wave it all away as untrustworthy without actually explaining what was said and why it couldn’t be trusted.
How did Carlson’s show go? He transitioned quickly into his frustration that the committee wasn’t addressing the real questions, in his estimation.
“What did happen, exactly, on Jan. 6? What’s the truth of that day?” Carlson said. “Well, that’s still unknown. From the extensive video we have of Jan. 6, it’s clear that some in the crowd, more than a few, were encouraging protesters to breach the Capitol. To commit felonies.”
The rest of us saw the committee begin to build its case that Trump planned and was in charge of all of it. We saw Jarred say he was too busy processing Presidential Pardons to really know what was going on which is pretty appalling on all kinds of fronts.
Liz Cheney: Rep. Scott Perry, 'multiple' GOP lawmakers sought pardons from Trump https://t.co/ffIhFrk51N
From The Washington Times article tweeted above as reported by Joseph Clark: “Liz Cheney: Rep. Scott Perry, ‘multiple’ GOP lawmakers sought pardons from Trump.”
Rep. Scott Perry was among “multiple” Republican lawmakers who sought presidential pardons in the weeks following the attack on the Capitol, the House Jan. 6 committee revealed Thursday.
“Representative Perry contacted the White House in the weeks after January 6th to seek a presidential pardon,” Committee Vice Chairwoman Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican, said during the panel’s prime-time hearing.
“Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election,” she said.
If you don't think you're guilty of a crime, you don't go fishing for a Presidential Pardon. . . https://t.co/Ec1HY6Ht8A
Cheney’s presentation was worthy of a major case argued before the Supreme Court. This is also from The Washington Post: “Rep. Liz Cheney tells Americans why Jan. 6 should terrify them. After months of preparation, Cheney tries to convince fellow Republicans and Wyoming voters of a chilling conspiracy.”
On Thursday night, at the first in a series of congressional hearings, Cheney narrated that case with a dispassionate but propulsive presentation of facts, often showing evidence from videotaped depositions from the former president’s inner circle admitting his claims of voter fraud had no merit. She teased the investigation’s biggest findings and sharply criticized her fellow Republicans for the roles that they played — including enabling and continuing to support Trump.
“There will come a point when Donald Trump is gone,” Cheney said, “but your dishonor will remain.”
These hearings, which continue Monday, could mark the pinnacle of Cheney’s political career or the end of it.
The former rising star of the GOP has already been alienated by party leaders, abandoned by longtime supporters and consistently attacked by Trump and his allies, who are backing a primary challenger Cheney will face in August. While most of the nine other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after Jan. 6 have either decided not to run for reelection or mostly avoided discussing the former president, Cheney has made her role as the vice chair of the select committee investigating the insurrection central to her pitch to voters. She is trying to convince them she’s on the right side of history — and that her Trump-free approach to conservatism is the right one.
Fox “News” was directly involved in the January 6 Insurrection and they are terrified for Americans to hear the truth. pic.twitter.com/123tj9hrdO
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 28: Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks during a Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol business meeting on Capitol Hill March 28, 2022 in Washington, DC. T (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Still, Liz Cheney is no hero. (This links to a piece in The UK Independent from a while ago.)
The New York Times‘s Peter Baker writes this lede “Trump Is Depicted as a Would-Be Autocrat Seeking to Hang Onto Power at All Costs. As the Jan. 6 committee outlined during its prime-time hearing, Donald J. Trump executed a seven-part conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election.” Baker describes the overall process and the case it will try to prove as presented in Chair Bennie Thompson’s opening statement.
In the entire 246-year history of the United States, there was surely never a more damning indictment presented against an American president than outlined on Thursday night in a cavernous congressional hearing room where the future of democracy felt on the line.
Other presidents have been accused of wrongdoing, even high crimes and misdemeanors, but the case against Donald J. Trump mounted by the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol described not just a rogue president but a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power at all costs.
As the committee portrayed it during its prime-time televised hearing, Mr. Trump executed a seven-part conspiracy to overturn a free and fair democratic election. According to the panel, he lied to the American people, ignored all evidence refuting his false fraud claims, pressured state and federal officials to throw out election results favoring his challenger, encouraged a violent mob to storm the Capitol and even signaled support for the execution of his own vice president.
“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the select committee. “The violence was no accident. It represents Trump’s last stand, most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.”
House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., sits at a committee hearing on September 17, 2020. Photo by Chip Somodevilla/UPI | License Photo
The Jan. 6 committee aired a closed door video of former Attorney General Bill Barr’s deposition to kick of the prime-time hearing.
Driving the news: “I told the president it was b******t. I didn’t want to be a part of it,” Barr said.
WATCH: Attorney General Barr declares that Donald Trump lost the Presidential election in 2020.
There is no doubt that the American people voted Trump out of office and the Select Committee has found no evidence of election fraud. pic.twitter.com/qa5qNyMXqS
— January 6th Committee (@January6thCmte) June 10, 2022
What they’re saying: CommitteeVice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said that testimony will reveal Trump saying that former Vice President Mike Pence “deserves” to be hanged on Jan. 6, which rioters were shouting.
“Maybe our supporters have the right idea,” Trump said, according to a testimony read by Cheney.
The big picture: Barr, who resigned in December 2020, has said that former President Trump’s false claims about the 2020 presidential election fueled his decision to cut ties with Trump.
Barr said in December 2020 that the Department of Justice had not uncovered evidence of widespread voter fraud that would change the result of the presidential election.
The congressional hearing into the events of January 6 on Thursday night focused attention on a single decisive person. Not the hearing’s powerful chair or the meticulous vice chair. Not the former U.S. president who tried to overthrow the government. Not the former vice president whom the former president said deserved hanging. Not the lawless insurrectionists, not the heroic police officers, not the documentarian who caught history on camera. The single decisive person is: you.
Through the Trump years, weary and defeated observers shrugged that nothing mattered, nothing ever moves the needle. America is two tribes, antagonistic; nothing can budge either one any distance.
This fatalism passed as cleverness, even as wisdom. This fatalism also functioned as an excuse. If nothing can be done, then no one can be blamed for not doing it. If nothing can be done, then we’re all off the hook.
The fatalism was always wrong. The important thing to remember about Donald Trump’s presidency is that he was beaten again, and again, and again. His protective congressional majority was stripped away in 2018. He was twice tainted by impeachment. He was defeated for reelection. His conspiracy to overturn that election defeat was thwarted.
Full justice was not served—not yet, anyway. But the country was saved, because enough people summoned up the nerve to do the right thing. Sometimes, that right thing was a terrifyingly close shave. Sometimes, the people doing the right thing had warmed up with a long spell of doing the wrong thing, as Vice President Mike Pence did a lot of wrong things before he did the right thing on January 6, 2021. But if there is one lesson to take from the Trump years, it’s not the cynical Twitter joke “LOL nothing matters.” The lesson is that everything mattered: every act of conscience, every act of honest reporting, every denial of the Big Lie, every ballot.
There are also those who are as duplicitous as Trump. They need to be held to account also.
Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, reached out to almost 30 Arizona lawmakers following then-President Trump’s defeat in the state’s 2020 election, urging them to reject President Biden’s victory, The Washington Post reported Friday.
The Post reported last month that Ginni Thomas sent emails to two lawmakers six days after the election to tell them to work on behalf of Trump and “fight back against fraud.” The most recent report, based on emails The Post obtained, raises the number Thomas contacted to 29.
A video showing former White House Advisor Ivanka Trump speaks during an interview with the Jan. 6 Committee. | J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Former President Donald Trump on Friday discounted his own daughter’s testimony that the 2020 presidential election results were not fraudulent.
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results. She had long since checked out and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!),” Trump posted on Truth Social, the social media platform he helped found.
…
Barr in his video deposition described Trump’s claims of election fraud as “bullshit.” Ivanka Trump echoed Barr’s comments in her own video testimony.
“I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying,” she said to the committee.
A U.S. Capitol Police officer described the Jan. 6, 2021, attack as a bloodied “war scene” as she watched injured colleagues try to push back rioters from the Capitol building. Caroline Edwards, believed to be the first law enforcement officer injured by the rioters that day, testified Thursday to the House committee investigating the attack.
“What I saw was just a war scene,” she said. “It was something like I had seen out of the movies. I could not believe my eyes. There were officers on the ground. They were bleeding. They were throwing up. I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell. It was carnage. It was chaos.”
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think that as a police officer and as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle,” she continued. “I am trained to detain a couple of subjects and handle a crowd, but I’m not combat trained. And that day, it was just hours of hand-to-hand combat.”
Caroline Edwards, a U.S. Capitol Police officer who was seriously injured at the Jan. 6 attack, says during the hearing: “I, whose literal blood, sweat and tears were shed that day defending the building that I spent countless holidays and weekends working in." pic.twitter.com/m7Rtd9Fmnw
I’m not sure if I did any justice to this coverage and event last night but I hope you’ll join me in describing your reaction. For me, it seems like I just relived something that I never ever expected to see in my lifetime. It feels personal and creates a level of PTSD in me that cannot even get on the Richter Scale of those officers whose lives were on the line. I have never felt closer to those of us that truly care about the dream of liberty and justice for all among us. I’m not sure what we all did to deserve this.
Take care this weekend. The Jan. 6 committee’s next hearing is Monday at 10 a.m. EDT. I will see you then to live blog our next step in this American Journey.
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