The Subpoena of the House of Selectors (Chairman J.K. King), a Democrat Activist, and the Case for an “Old” President
The letter from the committee that went with the subpoena explained the reasons it believes Trump was involved in the effort to overturn the election.
The committee still has a report to publish and could also request that the Justice Department pursue charges against Trump or his former aides for their roles in helping to incite the attack on the Capitol and their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
“They are trying to make the case that Trump is Oz,” said CNN’s John King, interpreting the committee’s subpoena of Trump. When he looks, it’s actually a man behind a curtain trying to pull a machine.
Contempt. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats until at least January, could vote to hold him in contempt of Congress, something it’s done with several other uncooperative witnesses.
You are going to prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of 30 days in jail. Bannon will be sentenced for failing to comply with the House subpoena later this month.
When the Supreme Court Acceded to Self-incrimination: A Response to the Trump Against the National Archives and President Donald J. Conway
George Conway, the Trump critic and conservative lawyer, said during an appearance on CNN Thursday that there was no chance of that happening. “This is about laying a marker. This is about triggering a response (from Trump).”
Conway did point out the Supreme Court has already made clear where it stands on Trump’s status as a former president when it ignored his attempt to block the National Archives from sharing information with the committee.
If President Trump or someone acting on his behalf knew that they couldn’t have these documents, they hid them or kept them, it was their right to do so.
Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming said the January 6 committee feels it has enough information to make referrals to the Department of Justice for prosecutions stemming from the committee’s work. More than 30 people have invoked the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination in order to explain their dealings with the former President.
Ford later testified as a former president in 1983 to a Senate subcommittee. The last time a president took questions from Congress was 39 years ago, according to the Senate Library and Senate Historical Office.
President Thomas Jefferson declined to appear at former Vice President Aaron Burr’s trial for treason even though he was subpoenaed by then-Chief Justice John Marshall. Jefferson did give some documents. Burr was eventually acquitted.
The fate of the ex-President Trump in a grand jury investigation of his crimes against a criminal attorney general and his public appearance at Mar-a-Lago
New York investigators could get access to financial documents according to a ruling by the Supreme Court. Trump’s company will go on criminal trial this month on charges of violating tax laws.
A judge forced him to comply with subpoenas from New York Attorney General Letitia James as part of her civil inquiry into his business practices. He used the Fifth Amendment protection against himself during the deposition.
New York Attorney General Letitia James wants a state court to stop the Trump Organization from moving assets because of her civil lawsuit that has accused them of long-term fraud.
That means the January 6 committee must plan to wrap up all of its work by January 3, 2023, when the next Congress begins and the January 6 committee may be no more.
According to the House select committee, former President Trump failed to comply with the subpoena for documents and testimony.
The hearing featured never-before-seen footage of congressional leaders, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, huddled in a secure location during the insurrection grappling with the implications of the pro-Trump mob’s attack on the Capitol. It also featured almost pitiful accounts of the ex-President’s desperate attempts to avoid publicly admitting he was a loser in 2020 and made a case that his full comprehension of his defeat made his subsequent actions even more heinous.
The developments that could hurt Trump the most happened off stage. They reflect the extraordinary legal thicket surrounding the ex-President, who has not been charged with a crime, and the distance still left to run for efforts to account for his riotous exit from power and a presidency that constantly tested the rule of law.
While Trump has frequently defied gathering investigative storms, and ever since launching his presidential campaign in 2015 has repeatedly confounded predictions of his imminent demise, there’s a sense that he’s sliding into an ever-deeper legal hole.
As the House select committee hearing went on, the Supreme Court sent word from across the road that it’s got no interest in getting sucked into Trump’s bid to derail a Justice Department probe into classified material he kept at Mar-a-Lago.
The court turned down his request, which could have delayed the case. No dissents were noted, including from conservative justices Trump elevated to the bench and whom he often seems to believe owe him a debt of loyalty.
Investigation of the January 6, 2016 Committee Hearing Using a Man at a Mar-A-Lago Resort, Washington, D.C.
The ongoing revelations over one of the darkest days in modern American history on January 6, is only part of the story, as it poses the ex- President’s biggest risk and most immediate threat of criminal exposure.
While television stations beamed blanket coverage of the committee hearing, more news broke that hinted at further grave legal problems the ex-President could face from another Justice Department investigation – also into January 6. The DOJ has the power to make indictments, something the House doesn’t.
A man who was once chief of staff for Vice President Mike Pence left a courthouse in Washington, DC. A person familiar with the matter told CNN that Short was compelled to testify for the second time. Another Trump adviser, former national security aide Kash Patel, was also seen walking into an area where the grand jury meets. Patel would not tell reporters what he was doing.
CNN reported late on Wednesday that a Trump employee told the FBI that he was directed by the ex President to move boxes out of a basement storage room at his club after a subpoena for any classified documents. The FBI also has surveillance footage showing a staffer moving the boxes.
This development is troubling because it may suggest a pattern of deception that leads to obstruction of justice charges. The FBI told the judge that there could be evidence of obstruction at the resort, which was the subject of the initial search warrant.
The details of what happened at Mar-a-Lago raised troubling questions, but David Schoen, the defense lawyer in Trump’s second impeachment, said they did not amount to obstruction of justice.
Those aren’t even the only probes connected to Trump. The ex President and his associates in Georgia are under investigation for trying to change the result of the 2020 election in a crucial swing state.
The Unselect Committee’s Decision to Subpoena the Ex-President Donald J.C. Budowich for the Elections of Dec. 6, 2020
On Thursday, one of those days when the seriousness of a crisis can be seen by the vehemence of the rhetoric he uses, Trump came out fighting.
The unanimous vote by the select committee to subpoena the former President was ridiculed by the first Trump spokesman.
“Pres Trump will not be intimidate(d) by their meritless rhetoric or un-American actions. Trump-endorsed candidates will sweep the Midterms, and America First leadership & solutions will be restored,” Budowich wrote on Twitter.
The former President wanted to stir up a political reaction with the post on his Truth Social network that didn’t answer the accusations against him.
The Unselect Committee should have asked me to testify months ago. Why did they wait until the last moment of the meeting? The Committee is a bad thing. Trump wrote.
Any effort to follow a similar path if Trump won’t testify would involve lengthy legal battles. It’s unclear whether the Justice Department would consider this a good investment, especially given the advanced state of its own January 6 probe. The committee is poised to be swept into history with the Republicans poised to take over the House majority following the elections.
The investigation was not only about what happened in January, it was about the future, according to Rep. Liz Cheney.
The Wyoming lawmaker, who lost her primary in August to a Trump backed opponent, said that the foundation of the republic was being eroded by every attempt to justify the actions of the former President.
“This is not a situation where the committee is going to put itself at the mercy of Donald Trump in terms of his efforts to create a circus,” Cheney said.
That being said, there is a strong chance the former president will not produce the documents by the end of the day. When it comes to deadlines, the committee has given a less than perfect time frame when communication with a subject’s legal team is ongoing.
The broad document request only asked for documents and communications relating to the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, and other extremists from September 1, 2020, onward. The panel has 19 different categories in its document request.
Other high-profile people found in the committee’s order include Roger Stone, Stephen Bannon, retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani and more.
The Investigative Subpoena Sentiment to the Subcommittee on Trump’s Implications for the 2020 Electoral Commission
“The committee has been working in a very collaborative way and I would anticipate we won’t have disagreements about that,” she said. We will have to make those decisions as we come to it.
On the same day that the House committee ordered Trump to turn over the documents and testify, the US District Judge sentenced the political advisor to four months in prison.
The committee did not give additional information after they received correspondence from the former President and his counsel.
Sources familiar with the matter say that lawyers for Trump accepted the subpoena as of October 26. Trump did not say whether he would comply with the subpoena.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the committee, previously said the committee was “in discussions” with Trump’s attorneys about testifying under oath in the probe. It’s unclear whether those discussions will lead to a deposition.
The committee has held witnesses in contempt of Congress in the past for ignoring subpoenas, but has little ability to force their compliance through the courts.
Thompson was concerned that the approach of your letter on behalf of Trump appeared to be a delay tactic.
“The truth is that Donald Trump, like several of his closest allies, is hiding from the Select Committee’s investigation and refusing to do what more than a thousand other witnesses have done,” Thompson and Cheney wrote. “Donald Trump orchestrated a scheme to overturn a presidential election and block the transfer of power. He is obligated to provide answers to the American people.”
Trump said in the lawsuit that the House’s demands, if he met them, would violate privilege protections around the executive branch, including revealing conversations he had with Justice Department officials and members of Congress about the 2020 election and “pending governmental business.”
According to a source, special counsel Jack Smith’s office received a subpoena for documents and testimony related to January 6. An attorney did not respond to a question.
Those efforts included putting forward slates of pro-Trump electors and filing baseless lawsuits. CNN reported this summer that the DOJ issued numerous subpoenas and was seeking information in all seven states where Trump’s campaign convened the false electors as part of the effort to subvert the Electoral College.
In November 2020, the campaign team of Donald Trump went to court to throw out over 10,000 missing ballots from Philadelphia and Allegheny counties. Those attempts were rejected by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, which argued in its opinion that “while constituting technical violations of the Election Code, [the mistakes] do not warrant the wholesale disenfranchisement of thousands of Pennsylvanian voters.”
Smith and other federal agencies were recently subpoenaed by a group of election security advocates, who said they want to investigate a series of voting system breeches in several states carried out by allies of Trump after the 2020 election.
The group has requested a federal probe into what it calls a “multi-state conspiracy to copy voting software,” pointing to reported breaches in Georgia, Michigan and Nevada.
The 2020 Georgia House Insights into Mark Meadows’ Attempts to Overturn the 2020 Election: A Communication from Stein and Raffensperger
Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Smith last month to oversee parts of the Justice Department’s criminal investigations into attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the retention of classified documents at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He will be tasked with making policy decisions regarding whether to charge Trump.
The phone call Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger made in the summer was caught on camera, as was the December 2020 White House meeting about election fraud claims. The site where an audit of Georgia’s election was underway and where Meadows sent emails about fraud allegations was visited by the Justice Department.
The investigation began after The New Yorker magazine reported that Mark Meadows, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, registered to vote weeks before the 2020 election at a mobile home in Macon County where he had allegedly never lived or even visited. According to the article, the former proprietor of the McConnell Road property had never visited or spent a night there and that his wife had left the house for two months within the past few years.
The State Bureau of Investigation did not interview Mark and Deborah Meadows because they did not wish to, according to the memo.
According to Friday’s release from Stein’s office, the “key facts” behind the decision not to charge the Meadowses were: (1) He was engaged in public service in Washington, DC, and therefore qualified for a residency exception under state law; (2) the Meadowses signed a yearlong lease for the Scaly Mountain residence that was provided by their landlord; and (3) cell phone records showed Debra Meadows was in and around Scaly Mountain in October 2020.
The statute of limitations expired for false information on an election form as soon as the office received the report, prosecutors said. The prosecutors decided that there would be a low likelihood of success and that they would have to prove that the Meadowses committed a felony.
CNN is reporting that the president’s former chief of staff is under investigation by the special counsel for his role in the January 6th insurrection.
In his statement Friday, Stein stated that MarkMeadows made many “unfounded, damaging allegations about voter fraud” before and after the 2020 election, and that the bipartisan January 6th congressional committee named him as a likely co-conspirator.
The FBI and the National Security Council Investigated the January 6, 2021 Violence in Mar-a-Lago, Fla: A First Step for a Grand Jury
O’Brien considered resigning from his post over Trump’s response to the violence on January 6, 2021, but ultimately decided to remain in the job, CNN previously reported. The National Security Council should have been involved in the handling of classified documents at end of the Trump presidency, and O’Brien may have knowledge of how those records ended up at Mar-a-Lago.
Rather than appearing before a federal grand jury, Wolf was interviewed under oath by Justice Department lawyers and FBI officials, something one of the sources characterized as a “standard” first step for prosecutors.
Wolf declined to discuss his recent interview with federal investigators. Smith’s spokesman also wouldn’t comment.
The federal grand jury was convened to investigate election interference and Ken Cuccinelli, Wolf’s deputy, testified last month. When Cuccinelli was asked at the time whether privilege claims arose, he said: “They did, and I didn’t say anything.”
In the days after the January 6 attack, Wolf urged Trump and all elected officials to condemn the violence on Capitol Hill, calling what transpired “tragic and sickening.”