Of course it's not what he's doing. Yeash. As was already explained. Was obama applying for a job that he got fired from when he ran for a second term?
Donald Trump Announces 2016 White House Bid
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Donald Trump's fate in hands of Justice Dept. after Jan. 6 report
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Eric Tucker And Lindsay Whitehurst
Published Dec 20, 2022 • 4 minute read
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee may have outlined a potential criminal case against Donald Trump, but it doesn’t actually bring the former president any closer to prosecution.
The Justice Department already has been conducting its own wide-ranging investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The special counsel overseeing that inquiry has given no indication of what charges he might bring, but he’s under no obligation to take the committee’s criminal referral into account or to follow the prosecution roadmap laid out by the panel.
“This is historic, that a Congressional committee has recommended criminal charges against a former president, but it does not change the fundamental fact that the Justice Department gets to decide who should be charged with crimes,” said Ronald Weich, the dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law and the department’s former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs.
“The Justice Department,” he added, “should not be influenced by another branch of government.”
The panel referred Trump for possible prosecution for four separate criminal offenses, related both to the riot itself and his efforts to cling to power. Those include allegations he aided the insurrection, conspired to defraud the United States by trying to prevent the transfer of power, conspired to make a false statement through an alleged scheme involving so-called “fake electors” and obstructed an official proceeding — the counting by Congress of electoral votes.
At least some of those potential charges cover general areas the Justice Department is known to already be investigating.
Prosecutors in June, for instance, issued a flurry of subpoenas to Republicans who served as “fake electors” in battleground states won by Trump. Trump and allies pressured authorities in those states to replace Biden’s electors with ones for him on specious or nonexistent allegations that his victory was stolen.
Easily the most consequential statute invoked by the committee is one that makes it a crime to either incite or aid an insurrection or rebellion against the government. The statute bars anyone convicted of it from holding future office.
It’s unclear how seriously the Justice Department might consider such a statute, which has not been used in any of the more than 900 federal prosecutions of the Capitol rioters themselves.
In the executive summary of the report, the committee says Trump was directly responsible for summoning to Washington supporters who later stormed the Capitol, and notes how a federal judge earlier this year — in refusing to dismiss lawsuits against Trump by Democratic lawmakers — held that Trump’s speech to a crowd of loyalists that day “plausibly” led to the riot.
But the committee’s suggestion that Trump could be held accountable for his inaction during the riot, including by not dispatching the military to the Capitol or by waiting hours to tell the crowd to disperse, may make sense on a “gut level” but is a theory the Justice Department is likely to be wary of, said Rory Little, a professor at UC Hastings Law in San Francisco.
“The danger of that idea, that standing by and watching an insurrection happen, when you might be able to do something about it, that’s a pretty dangerous precedent to set,” he said. “American criminal law doesn’t generally punish people who just stand by and watch.”
Still, the criminal referrals will almost certainly accelerate demands for action by Attorney General Merrick Garland from Democrats and members of the public who regard the referral, and the accompanying evidence being transmitted to the Justice Department, as a template for prosecution.
And the committee — whose chief investigative counsel is a former U.S. attorney — also has earned broad credibility for its information-packed public hearings and for a sprawling investigation that included interviews with more than 1,000 people.
There have also been instances in which judges have agreed that there is basis to suspect Trump of wrongdoing.
In March, a federal judge in California, in authorizing the release to the House committee of more than 100 emails from conservative lawyer and Trump adviser John Eastman, asserted that it was “more likely than not” that Trump had committed crimes in his attempt to stop the certification of the election. The judge, David Carter, cited in his ruling two of the same statutes — conspiring to defraud the U.S. and obstructing an official proceeding — as the committee did in its report Monday.
The committee has already made multiple referrals for contempt of Congress that the Justice Department has taken up. Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was convicted in July of defying a congressional subpoena, and former adviser Peter Navarro is awaiting trial on similar allegations.
But there’s a distinction between the Trump referrals on Monday and those involving Bannon and Navarro, Weich said. Under the contempt of Congress law, Congress is itself the victim and the Justice Department is obligated to present the case to a grand jury, he said.
That’s different from the Trump referral, where Congress is reporting a broader crime, one they’ve framed as an attack on democracy.
And more broadly, the burden of proof faced by the committee — which did not need to cross-examine witnesses or test evidence before a jury — is vastly different from what the Justice Department would have to establish in court.
“It’s a completely different judgment,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who teaches law at George Washington University.
“Congress is making a political judgment. They’re not prosecutors, it’s not their role to make those decisions, and they’re not trying to prove these allegations beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.”
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Eric Tucker And Lindsay Whitehurst
Published Dec 20, 2022 • 4 minute read
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee may have outlined a potential criminal case against Donald Trump, but it doesn’t actually bring the former president any closer to prosecution.
The Justice Department already has been conducting its own wide-ranging investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the efforts by Trump and his allies to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The special counsel overseeing that inquiry has given no indication of what charges he might bring, but he’s under no obligation to take the committee’s criminal referral into account or to follow the prosecution roadmap laid out by the panel.
“This is historic, that a Congressional committee has recommended criminal charges against a former president, but it does not change the fundamental fact that the Justice Department gets to decide who should be charged with crimes,” said Ronald Weich, the dean of the University of Baltimore School of Law and the department’s former assistant attorney general for legislative affairs.
“The Justice Department,” he added, “should not be influenced by another branch of government.”
The panel referred Trump for possible prosecution for four separate criminal offenses, related both to the riot itself and his efforts to cling to power. Those include allegations he aided the insurrection, conspired to defraud the United States by trying to prevent the transfer of power, conspired to make a false statement through an alleged scheme involving so-called “fake electors” and obstructed an official proceeding — the counting by Congress of electoral votes.
At least some of those potential charges cover general areas the Justice Department is known to already be investigating.
Prosecutors in June, for instance, issued a flurry of subpoenas to Republicans who served as “fake electors” in battleground states won by Trump. Trump and allies pressured authorities in those states to replace Biden’s electors with ones for him on specious or nonexistent allegations that his victory was stolen.
Easily the most consequential statute invoked by the committee is one that makes it a crime to either incite or aid an insurrection or rebellion against the government. The statute bars anyone convicted of it from holding future office.
It’s unclear how seriously the Justice Department might consider such a statute, which has not been used in any of the more than 900 federal prosecutions of the Capitol rioters themselves.
In the executive summary of the report, the committee says Trump was directly responsible for summoning to Washington supporters who later stormed the Capitol, and notes how a federal judge earlier this year — in refusing to dismiss lawsuits against Trump by Democratic lawmakers — held that Trump’s speech to a crowd of loyalists that day “plausibly” led to the riot.
But the committee’s suggestion that Trump could be held accountable for his inaction during the riot, including by not dispatching the military to the Capitol or by waiting hours to tell the crowd to disperse, may make sense on a “gut level” but is a theory the Justice Department is likely to be wary of, said Rory Little, a professor at UC Hastings Law in San Francisco.
“The danger of that idea, that standing by and watching an insurrection happen, when you might be able to do something about it, that’s a pretty dangerous precedent to set,” he said. “American criminal law doesn’t generally punish people who just stand by and watch.”
Still, the criminal referrals will almost certainly accelerate demands for action by Attorney General Merrick Garland from Democrats and members of the public who regard the referral, and the accompanying evidence being transmitted to the Justice Department, as a template for prosecution.
And the committee — whose chief investigative counsel is a former U.S. attorney — also has earned broad credibility for its information-packed public hearings and for a sprawling investigation that included interviews with more than 1,000 people.
There have also been instances in which judges have agreed that there is basis to suspect Trump of wrongdoing.
In March, a federal judge in California, in authorizing the release to the House committee of more than 100 emails from conservative lawyer and Trump adviser John Eastman, asserted that it was “more likely than not” that Trump had committed crimes in his attempt to stop the certification of the election. The judge, David Carter, cited in his ruling two of the same statutes — conspiring to defraud the U.S. and obstructing an official proceeding — as the committee did in its report Monday.
The committee has already made multiple referrals for contempt of Congress that the Justice Department has taken up. Longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was convicted in July of defying a congressional subpoena, and former adviser Peter Navarro is awaiting trial on similar allegations.
But there’s a distinction between the Trump referrals on Monday and those involving Bannon and Navarro, Weich said. Under the contempt of Congress law, Congress is itself the victim and the Justice Department is obligated to present the case to a grand jury, he said.
That’s different from the Trump referral, where Congress is reporting a broader crime, one they’ve framed as an attack on democracy.
And more broadly, the burden of proof faced by the committee — which did not need to cross-examine witnesses or test evidence before a jury — is vastly different from what the Justice Department would have to establish in court.
“It’s a completely different judgment,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor in Washington who teaches law at George Washington University.
“Congress is making a political judgment. They’re not prosecutors, it’s not their role to make those decisions, and they’re not trying to prove these allegations beyond a reasonable doubt to a jury.”
Donald Trump's fate in hands of Justice Dept. after Jan. 6 report
House Jan. 6 committee may have outlined a criminal case against Donald Trump, but it doesn't actually bring him any closer to prosecution.
Trump paid no income tax in 2020, reported losses in office, records show
Author of the article:Reuters
Reuters
Andy Sullivan
Published Dec 21, 2022 • 2 minute read
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump paid no income tax during the final full year of his presidency as he reported a loss from his sprawling business interests, according to tax figures released by a congressional panel.
The records, released late on Tuesday by the Democratic-led House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee after a years-long fight, show that Trump’s income, and his tax liability, fluctuated dramatically during his four years in the White House.
The records cut against the Republican ex-president’s long-cultivated image as a successful businessman as he mounts another bid for the White House.
Trump and his wife, Melania, paid some form of tax during all four years, the documents showed, but were able to minimize their income taxes in several years as income from Trump’s businesses was more than offset by deductions and losses.
The committee questioned the legitimacy of some of those deductions, including one for $916 million, and members said on Tuesday the tax returns were short on details. The panel is expected to release redacted versions of his full returns in coming days.
Trump refused to make his tax returns public during his two presidential bids and his campaign for office, even though all other major-party presidential candidates have done so for decades.
The committee obtained the records after a years-long fight and voted on Tuesday to make them public.
A Trump spokesman said the release of the documents was politically motivated.
“If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans without cause,” Trump Organization spokesman Steven Cheung said on Wednesday.
Democrats on the panel said their review found that tax authorities did not properly scrutinize Trump’s complex tax returns to ensure accuracy.
Though the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is supposed to audit presidents’ tax returns each year, it did not do so until Democrats pressed for action in 2019.
The IRS assigned only one agent to the audit most of the time, the panel found, and did not examine some of the deductions claimed by Trump.
The IRS declined to comment.
Prior to taking office, Trump reported heavy losses for many years from his business to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to media reports and trial testimony about his finances.
The documents released by the committee showed that pattern continued during his time in the White House.
During that time Trump and his wife were liable for self-employment and household employment taxes. As a result, they paid a total of $3 million in taxes over those four years.
But deductions enabled them to minimize their income tax liability in several years.
In 2017, Trump and his wife reported adjusted gross income of negative $12.9 million, leading to a net income tax of $750, the records showed.
They reported adjusted gross income of $24.3 million in 2018 and paid a net tax of $1 million, while in 2019 they reported $4.4 million of income in 2019 and paid $134,000 in taxes.
In 2020, they reported a loss of $4.8 million and paid no net income tax.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Reuters
Reuters
Andy Sullivan
Published Dec 21, 2022 • 2 minute read
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump paid no income tax during the final full year of his presidency as he reported a loss from his sprawling business interests, according to tax figures released by a congressional panel.
The records, released late on Tuesday by the Democratic-led House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee after a years-long fight, show that Trump’s income, and his tax liability, fluctuated dramatically during his four years in the White House.
The records cut against the Republican ex-president’s long-cultivated image as a successful businessman as he mounts another bid for the White House.
Trump and his wife, Melania, paid some form of tax during all four years, the documents showed, but were able to minimize their income taxes in several years as income from Trump’s businesses was more than offset by deductions and losses.
The committee questioned the legitimacy of some of those deductions, including one for $916 million, and members said on Tuesday the tax returns were short on details. The panel is expected to release redacted versions of his full returns in coming days.
Trump refused to make his tax returns public during his two presidential bids and his campaign for office, even though all other major-party presidential candidates have done so for decades.
The committee obtained the records after a years-long fight and voted on Tuesday to make them public.
A Trump spokesman said the release of the documents was politically motivated.
“If this injustice can happen to President Trump, it can happen to all Americans without cause,” Trump Organization spokesman Steven Cheung said on Wednesday.
Democrats on the panel said their review found that tax authorities did not properly scrutinize Trump’s complex tax returns to ensure accuracy.
Though the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is supposed to audit presidents’ tax returns each year, it did not do so until Democrats pressed for action in 2019.
The IRS assigned only one agent to the audit most of the time, the panel found, and did not examine some of the deductions claimed by Trump.
The IRS declined to comment.
Prior to taking office, Trump reported heavy losses for many years from his business to offset hundreds of millions of dollars in income, according to media reports and trial testimony about his finances.
The documents released by the committee showed that pattern continued during his time in the White House.
During that time Trump and his wife were liable for self-employment and household employment taxes. As a result, they paid a total of $3 million in taxes over those four years.
But deductions enabled them to minimize their income tax liability in several years.
In 2017, Trump and his wife reported adjusted gross income of negative $12.9 million, leading to a net income tax of $750, the records showed.
They reported adjusted gross income of $24.3 million in 2018 and paid a net tax of $1 million, while in 2019 they reported $4.4 million of income in 2019 and paid $134,000 in taxes.
In 2020, they reported a loss of $4.8 million and paid no net income tax.
Trump paid no income tax in 2020, reported losses in office, records show
Donald Trump paid no income tax during the final full year of his presidency as he reported a loss from his sprawling business interests.
April trial date set for woman's civil claim that Trump raped her
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Published Dec 21, 2022 • 1 minute read
NEW YORK — An April trial date was set Wednesday by a federal judge for a civil trial arising from a former columnist’s claim that Donald Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan scheduled an April 17 trial after he rejected a request by Trump’s lawyers to delay the trial until the end of the year.
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll said in a book published in 2019 that Trump raped her, causing the then U.S. president to say it never happened. He has repeatedly insisted that Carroll has made up the claim that he had attacked her in a dressing room after they met each other at an upscale Manhattan store by chance and engaged in playful banter.
She initially filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, but she recently updated it to a rape allegation after the November enactment of a New York State law that temporarily allows sexual assault victims to sue their abusers for crimes that occurred decades ago.
Kaplan has said the updated lawsuit did not require extensive collection of additional evidence for the trial because whether the rape occurred was also central to the merits of the defamation lawsuit.
The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault in stories unless they agree to tell their stories publicly, as Carroll has done.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Published Dec 21, 2022 • 1 minute read
NEW YORK — An April trial date was set Wednesday by a federal judge for a civil trial arising from a former columnist’s claim that Donald Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in the mid-1990s.
Judge Lewis A. Kaplan scheduled an April 17 trial after he rejected a request by Trump’s lawyers to delay the trial until the end of the year.
Advice columnist E. Jean Carroll said in a book published in 2019 that Trump raped her, causing the then U.S. president to say it never happened. He has repeatedly insisted that Carroll has made up the claim that he had attacked her in a dressing room after they met each other at an upscale Manhattan store by chance and engaged in playful banter.
She initially filed a defamation lawsuit against Trump, but she recently updated it to a rape allegation after the November enactment of a New York State law that temporarily allows sexual assault victims to sue their abusers for crimes that occurred decades ago.
Kaplan has said the updated lawsuit did not require extensive collection of additional evidence for the trial because whether the rape occurred was also central to the merits of the defamation lawsuit.
The Associated Press generally does not name alleged victims of sexual assault in stories unless they agree to tell their stories publicly, as Carroll has done.
April trial date set for woman's civil claim that Trump raped her
April trial date was set Wednesday by a federal judge for a civil trial arising from a former columnist's claim that Donald Trump raped her
Trump calls NY sexual-abuse law unconstitutional in rape accuser’s suit
E. Jean Carroll claims Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Erik Larson
Published Dec 22, 2022 • 2 minute read
Former President Donald Trump said a New York law temporarily allowing people to sue over alleged sexual abuse that may have occurred decades earlier was violating the constitutional rights of “countless people,” including himself.
Trump made the argument late Wednesday in a motion to dismiss author E. Jean Carroll’s civil battery suit against him under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which went into effect Nov. 24. Carroll claims Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s. He has denied her allegation.
The new law is a “clear abuse of legislative power” that violates the due process rights in New York’s constitution, Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, wrote in the motion filed in Manhattan federal court.
“The Adult Survivors Act, well-intentioned as it may be, is a fundamentally flawed law that is unable to withstand constitutional scrutiny,” Habba said. The law “inherently deprives countless individuals of their constitutional right to due process by forcing them to defend against these once-stale claims.”
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
New York’s statute of limitations on such claims was raised to 20 years from just one year in 2019, but the change wasn’t retroactive. The Adult Survivors Act was intended to fill the gap by creating a one-year window for victims to file civil suits no matter how old their claims may be.
Critics say the coming flood of lawsuits under the law raises due-process concerns because of the difficulty of defending older claims. Trump is one of the first defendants to challenge the Adult Survivors Act’s constitutionality.
Carroll previously sued Trump for defamation after he publicly denied her rape claim in 2019. She included a new defamation claim in her battery lawsuit over an Oct. 12 social-media posting in which he accused her — again — of fabricating the attack to help sell a book.
Habba argued in Wednesday’s filing that Carroll’s new defamation claim should also be dismissed as “a rehash of the defamation claim she brought over three years ago” and because it was “baseless and legally defective due to failure to demonstrate cognizable damages.”
Carroll, a former advice columnist with Elle magazine, argues the former president’s October social-media post damaged her reputation as a self-publishing journalist.
Her earlier defamation suit and the new battery suit are currently set for separate trials in April, though Carroll is seeking to have them combined.
torontosun.com
E. Jean Carroll claims Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s
Author of the article:Bloomberg News
Bloomberg News
Erik Larson
Published Dec 22, 2022 • 2 minute read
Former President Donald Trump said a New York law temporarily allowing people to sue over alleged sexual abuse that may have occurred decades earlier was violating the constitutional rights of “countless people,” including himself.
Trump made the argument late Wednesday in a motion to dismiss author E. Jean Carroll’s civil battery suit against him under New York’s Adult Survivors Act, which went into effect Nov. 24. Carroll claims Trump raped her in a department store dressing room in Manhattan in the 1990s. He has denied her allegation.
The new law is a “clear abuse of legislative power” that violates the due process rights in New York’s constitution, Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, wrote in the motion filed in Manhattan federal court.
“The Adult Survivors Act, well-intentioned as it may be, is a fundamentally flawed law that is unable to withstand constitutional scrutiny,” Habba said. The law “inherently deprives countless individuals of their constitutional right to due process by forcing them to defend against these once-stale claims.”
Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, didn’t immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
New York’s statute of limitations on such claims was raised to 20 years from just one year in 2019, but the change wasn’t retroactive. The Adult Survivors Act was intended to fill the gap by creating a one-year window for victims to file civil suits no matter how old their claims may be.
Critics say the coming flood of lawsuits under the law raises due-process concerns because of the difficulty of defending older claims. Trump is one of the first defendants to challenge the Adult Survivors Act’s constitutionality.
Carroll previously sued Trump for defamation after he publicly denied her rape claim in 2019. She included a new defamation claim in her battery lawsuit over an Oct. 12 social-media posting in which he accused her — again — of fabricating the attack to help sell a book.
Habba argued in Wednesday’s filing that Carroll’s new defamation claim should also be dismissed as “a rehash of the defamation claim she brought over three years ago” and because it was “baseless and legally defective due to failure to demonstrate cognizable damages.”
Carroll, a former advice columnist with Elle magazine, argues the former president’s October social-media post damaged her reputation as a self-publishing journalist.
Her earlier defamation suit and the new battery suit are currently set for separate trials in April, though Carroll is seeking to have them combined.
Trump calls NY sexual-abuse law unconstitutional in rape accuser’s suit
Trump made the argument late Wednesday in a motion to dismiss author E. Jean Carroll’s civil battery suit against him.
While i do empathize a great deal with people who were sexually assaulted and may not have felt they could come forward at the time, or were too emotionally messed up from the event to do so, it DOES seem a little unfair for someone to have to defend themselves against that kind of allegation more than 20 years later. How do you prove where you were or what you were doing on a day 20 years ago? How do you find people you were with that day as witnesses or the like, and even if you could how do THEY remember the details of the day? 20 years is a very long time, especially when we're talking about a CIVIL suit that has a much much lower burden of proof.
This seems like a really bad law. I can see it being more like 5 years max but unlimited? Even 20 seems like too much.
This seems like a really bad law. I can see it being more like 5 years max but unlimited? Even 20 seems like too much.
Trump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, Farnoush Amiri, Jill Colvin, Michael Balsamo and Nomaan Merchant
Published Dec 23, 2022 • 6 minute read
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee’s final report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection two years ago.
Trump “lit that fire,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, writes.
The 814-page report released late Thursday comes after the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, held 10 hearings and obtained more than a million pages of documents. The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s “premeditated” actions in the weeks ahead of the attack and how his wide-ranging efforts to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.
The insurrection gravely threatened democracy and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” the bipartisan nine-member panel concluded, offering a definitive account of a dark chapter in modern American history. It functions not only as a compendium of the most dramatic moments of testimony from months of hearings, but also as a document that is to be preserved as a warning for future generations.
In a series of recommendations, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee suggest that Congress consider barring Trump from holding future office. The findings should be a “clarion call to all Americans: to vigilantly guard our Democracy and to give our vote only to those dutiful in their defence of our Constitution,” says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a foreword to the report.
The report’s eight chapters tell the story largely as the panel’s hearings did this summer — describing the many facets of the remarkable plan that Trump and his advisers devised to try and void President Joe Biden’s victory. The lawmakers detail the former president’s pressure on states, federal officials, lawmakers and Vice-President Mike Pence to game the system or break the law.
In the two months between the election and the insurrection, the report says, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.”
Trump’s repeated, false claims of widespread voter fraud resonated with his supporters, the committee said, and were amplified on social media, building on the distrust of government he had fostered for his four years in office. And he did little to stop them when they resorted to violence and stormed the Capitol, interrupting the certification of Biden’s victory.
The massive, damning report comes as Trump is running again for the presidency and also facing multiple federal investigations, including probes of his role in the insurrection and the presence of classified documents at his Florida estate. This week is particularly fraught for him, as a House committee voted to release his tax returns after he has fought for years to keep them private. At the same time, Trump has been blamed by Republicans for a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, leaving him in his most politically vulnerable state since he was elected in 2016.
Looking forward, the committee makes several suggestions for action, including an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, the election law that Trump tried to circumvent. Bipartisan legislation to make it harder for lawmakers to object to presidential results, and for the vice-president to intervene, is set to be passed as part of year-end spending legislation on Friday and sent to Biden for his signature.
The panel also notes in that section that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution can be prevented from holding office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion.
Trump “is unfit for any office,” writes the committee’s vice-chairwoman, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on Jan. 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The committee did include that statement, noting that he followed it with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”
The report details a multitude of failings by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, noting that many of the rioters came with weapons and had openly planned for violence online before they overwhelmed underprepared law enforcement. “The failure to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it,” the report says.
At the same time, the committee makes an emphatic point that security failures are not the primary cause for the insurrection.
“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” Thompson wrote.
“Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson writes. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”
The report details Trump’s inaction as his loyalists were storming the building, detailing the hours when he watched the violence on television but did nothing to stop it.
A White House photographer snapped a picture of Trump at 1:21 p.m., learning of the early violence from an employee upon returning to the White House after his speech — after his own security officials had rebuffed his efforts to go to the Capitol himself. “By that time, if not sooner, he had been made aware of the violent riot,” the report states.
In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message hours later in which he asked his supporters to go home even as he reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.”
That inaction was a “dereliction of duty,” the report says, noting that Trump had more power than any other person as the nation’s commander-in-chief. “He willfully remained idle even as others, including his own Vice-President, acted.”
During those hours, Pence huddled and hid in the Capitol, begging security officials for a quicker National Guard response as rioters outside called for his hanging because he would not illegally try to thwart Biden’s win as Congress was counting the votes. Inside the White House, dozens of staffers and associates pleaded with Trump to make a forceful statement.
But he did not.
“We all look like domestic terrorists now,” longtime aide Hope Hicks texted Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, in the aftermath.
The report says “virtually everyone on the White House staff” interviewed by the committee condemned Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet — just as the rioters were first breaking into the Capitol — that Vice-President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
“Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” Hicks texted another colleague that evening.
The investigation’s release is a final act for House Democrats who are ceding power to Republicans in less than two weeks, and have spent much of their four years in power investigating Trump. Democrats impeached Trump twice, the second time a week after the insurrection. He was acquitted by the Senate both times. Other Democratic-led probes investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family.
On Monday, the panel officially passed their investigation to the Justice Department, recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. While the criminal referrals have no legal standing, they are a final statement from the committee after its extensive, year-and-a-half-long probe.
The committee has also begun to release hundreds of transcripts of its interviews. On Thursday, the panel released transcripts of two closed-door interviews with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in person at one of the televised hearings over the summer and described in vivid detail Trump’s actions and inaction inside the White House.
In the two interviews, both conducted after her June appearance at the hearing, Hutchinson described how many of Trump’s allies, including her lawyer, pressured her not to say too much in her committee interviews.
torontosun.com
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, Farnoush Amiri, Jill Colvin, Michael Balsamo and Nomaan Merchant
Published Dec 23, 2022 • 6 minute read
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee’s final report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection two years ago.
Trump “lit that fire,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, writes.
The 814-page report released late Thursday comes after the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, held 10 hearings and obtained more than a million pages of documents. The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s “premeditated” actions in the weeks ahead of the attack and how his wide-ranging efforts to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.
The insurrection gravely threatened democracy and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” the bipartisan nine-member panel concluded, offering a definitive account of a dark chapter in modern American history. It functions not only as a compendium of the most dramatic moments of testimony from months of hearings, but also as a document that is to be preserved as a warning for future generations.
In a series of recommendations, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee suggest that Congress consider barring Trump from holding future office. The findings should be a “clarion call to all Americans: to vigilantly guard our Democracy and to give our vote only to those dutiful in their defence of our Constitution,” says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a foreword to the report.
The report’s eight chapters tell the story largely as the panel’s hearings did this summer — describing the many facets of the remarkable plan that Trump and his advisers devised to try and void President Joe Biden’s victory. The lawmakers detail the former president’s pressure on states, federal officials, lawmakers and Vice-President Mike Pence to game the system or break the law.
In the two months between the election and the insurrection, the report says, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.”
Trump’s repeated, false claims of widespread voter fraud resonated with his supporters, the committee said, and were amplified on social media, building on the distrust of government he had fostered for his four years in office. And he did little to stop them when they resorted to violence and stormed the Capitol, interrupting the certification of Biden’s victory.
The massive, damning report comes as Trump is running again for the presidency and also facing multiple federal investigations, including probes of his role in the insurrection and the presence of classified documents at his Florida estate. This week is particularly fraught for him, as a House committee voted to release his tax returns after he has fought for years to keep them private. At the same time, Trump has been blamed by Republicans for a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, leaving him in his most politically vulnerable state since he was elected in 2016.
Looking forward, the committee makes several suggestions for action, including an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, the election law that Trump tried to circumvent. Bipartisan legislation to make it harder for lawmakers to object to presidential results, and for the vice-president to intervene, is set to be passed as part of year-end spending legislation on Friday and sent to Biden for his signature.
The panel also notes in that section that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution can be prevented from holding office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion.
Trump “is unfit for any office,” writes the committee’s vice-chairwoman, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on Jan. 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The committee did include that statement, noting that he followed it with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”
The report details a multitude of failings by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, noting that many of the rioters came with weapons and had openly planned for violence online before they overwhelmed underprepared law enforcement. “The failure to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it,” the report says.
At the same time, the committee makes an emphatic point that security failures are not the primary cause for the insurrection.
“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” Thompson wrote.
“Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson writes. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”
The report details Trump’s inaction as his loyalists were storming the building, detailing the hours when he watched the violence on television but did nothing to stop it.
A White House photographer snapped a picture of Trump at 1:21 p.m., learning of the early violence from an employee upon returning to the White House after his speech — after his own security officials had rebuffed his efforts to go to the Capitol himself. “By that time, if not sooner, he had been made aware of the violent riot,” the report states.
In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message hours later in which he asked his supporters to go home even as he reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.”
That inaction was a “dereliction of duty,” the report says, noting that Trump had more power than any other person as the nation’s commander-in-chief. “He willfully remained idle even as others, including his own Vice-President, acted.”
During those hours, Pence huddled and hid in the Capitol, begging security officials for a quicker National Guard response as rioters outside called for his hanging because he would not illegally try to thwart Biden’s win as Congress was counting the votes. Inside the White House, dozens of staffers and associates pleaded with Trump to make a forceful statement.
But he did not.
“We all look like domestic terrorists now,” longtime aide Hope Hicks texted Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, in the aftermath.
The report says “virtually everyone on the White House staff” interviewed by the committee condemned Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet — just as the rioters were first breaking into the Capitol — that Vice-President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
“Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” Hicks texted another colleague that evening.
The investigation’s release is a final act for House Democrats who are ceding power to Republicans in less than two weeks, and have spent much of their four years in power investigating Trump. Democrats impeached Trump twice, the second time a week after the insurrection. He was acquitted by the Senate both times. Other Democratic-led probes investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family.
On Monday, the panel officially passed their investigation to the Justice Department, recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. While the criminal referrals have no legal standing, they are a final statement from the committee after its extensive, year-and-a-half-long probe.
The committee has also begun to release hundreds of transcripts of its interviews. On Thursday, the panel released transcripts of two closed-door interviews with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in person at one of the televised hearings over the summer and described in vivid detail Trump’s actions and inaction inside the White House.
In the two interviews, both conducted after her June appearance at the hearing, Hutchinson described how many of Trump’s allies, including her lawyer, pressured her not to say too much in her committee interviews.
Jan. 6 report: Trump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection
The House Jan. 6 committee's report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a "multi-part conspiracy" to overturn the results of the 2020 election
String him up by the ppTrump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection
Author of the article:Associated Press
Associated Press
Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker, Farnoush Amiri, Jill Colvin, Michael Balsamo and Nomaan Merchant
Published Dec 23, 2022 • 6 minute read
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee’s final report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a “multi-part conspiracy” to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 presidential election and failed to act to stop his supporters from attacking the Capitol, concluding an extraordinary 18-month investigation into the former president and the violent insurrection two years ago.
Trump “lit that fire,” the committee’s chairman, Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, writes.
The 814-page report released late Thursday comes after the panel interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, held 10 hearings and obtained more than a million pages of documents. The witnesses — ranging from many of Trump’s closest aides to law enforcement to some of the rioters themselves — detailed Trump’s “premeditated” actions in the weeks ahead of the attack and how his wide-ranging efforts to overturn his defeat directly influenced those who brutally pushed past the police and smashed through the windows and doors of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The central cause was “one man,” the report says: Trump.
The insurrection gravely threatened democracy and “put the lives of American lawmakers at risk,” the bipartisan nine-member panel concluded, offering a definitive account of a dark chapter in modern American history. It functions not only as a compendium of the most dramatic moments of testimony from months of hearings, but also as a document that is to be preserved as a warning for future generations.
In a series of recommendations, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee suggest that Congress consider barring Trump from holding future office. The findings should be a “clarion call to all Americans: to vigilantly guard our Democracy and to give our vote only to those dutiful in their defence of our Constitution,” says House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a foreword to the report.
The report’s eight chapters tell the story largely as the panel’s hearings did this summer — describing the many facets of the remarkable plan that Trump and his advisers devised to try and void President Joe Biden’s victory. The lawmakers detail the former president’s pressure on states, federal officials, lawmakers and Vice-President Mike Pence to game the system or break the law.
In the two months between the election and the insurrection, the report says, “President Trump or his inner circle engaged in at least 200 apparent acts of public or private outreach, pressure, or condemnation, targeting either State legislators or State or local election administrators, to overturn State election results.”
Trump’s repeated, false claims of widespread voter fraud resonated with his supporters, the committee said, and were amplified on social media, building on the distrust of government he had fostered for his four years in office. And he did little to stop them when they resorted to violence and stormed the Capitol, interrupting the certification of Biden’s victory.
The massive, damning report comes as Trump is running again for the presidency and also facing multiple federal investigations, including probes of his role in the insurrection and the presence of classified documents at his Florida estate. This week is particularly fraught for him, as a House committee voted to release his tax returns after he has fought for years to keep them private. At the same time, Trump has been blamed by Republicans for a worse-than-expected showing in the midterm elections, leaving him in his most politically vulnerable state since he was elected in 2016.
Looking forward, the committee makes several suggestions for action, including an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, the election law that Trump tried to circumvent. Bipartisan legislation to make it harder for lawmakers to object to presidential results, and for the vice-president to intervene, is set to be passed as part of year-end spending legislation on Friday and sent to Biden for his signature.
The panel also notes in that section that the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution holds that anyone who has taken an oath to uphold the Constitution can be prevented from holding office for engaging in insurrection or rebellion.
Trump “is unfit for any office,” writes the committee’s vice-chairwoman, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming.
Posting on his social media site, Trump called the report “highly partisan” and falsely claimed it didn’t include his statement on Jan. 6 that his supporters should protest “peacefully and patriotically.” The committee did include that statement, noting that he followed it with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”
The report details a multitude of failings by law enforcement and intelligence agencies, noting that many of the rioters came with weapons and had openly planned for violence online before they overwhelmed underprepared law enforcement. “The failure to sufficiently share and act upon that intelligence jeopardized the lives of the police officers defending the Capitol and everyone in it,” the report says.
At the same time, the committee makes an emphatic point that security failures are not the primary cause for the insurrection.
“The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” Thompson wrote.
“Donald Trump lit that fire,” Thompson writes. “But in the weeks beforehand, the kindling he ultimately ignited was amassed in plain sight.”
The report details Trump’s inaction as his loyalists were storming the building, detailing the hours when he watched the violence on television but did nothing to stop it.
A White House photographer snapped a picture of Trump at 1:21 p.m., learning of the early violence from an employee upon returning to the White House after his speech — after his own security officials had rebuffed his efforts to go to the Capitol himself. “By that time, if not sooner, he had been made aware of the violent riot,” the report states.
In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message hours later in which he asked his supporters to go home even as he reassured them, “We love you, you’re very special.”
That inaction was a “dereliction of duty,” the report says, noting that Trump had more power than any other person as the nation’s commander-in-chief. “He willfully remained idle even as others, including his own Vice-President, acted.”
During those hours, Pence huddled and hid in the Capitol, begging security officials for a quicker National Guard response as rioters outside called for his hanging because he would not illegally try to thwart Biden’s win as Congress was counting the votes. Inside the White House, dozens of staffers and associates pleaded with Trump to make a forceful statement.
But he did not.
“We all look like domestic terrorists now,” longtime aide Hope Hicks texted Julie Radford, who served as Ivanka Trump’s chief of staff, in the aftermath.
The report says “virtually everyone on the White House staff” interviewed by the committee condemned Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet — just as the rioters were first breaking into the Capitol — that Vice-President Mike Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.”
“Attacking the VP? Wtf is wrong with him,” Hicks texted another colleague that evening.
The investigation’s release is a final act for House Democrats who are ceding power to Republicans in less than two weeks, and have spent much of their four years in power investigating Trump. Democrats impeached Trump twice, the second time a week after the insurrection. He was acquitted by the Senate both times. Other Democratic-led probes investigated his finances, his businesses, his foreign ties and his family.
On Monday, the panel officially passed their investigation to the Justice Department, recommending the department investigate the former president on four crimes, including aiding an insurrection. While the criminal referrals have no legal standing, they are a final statement from the committee after its extensive, year-and-a-half-long probe.
The committee has also begun to release hundreds of transcripts of its interviews. On Thursday, the panel released transcripts of two closed-door interviews with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified in person at one of the televised hearings over the summer and described in vivid detail Trump’s actions and inaction inside the White House.
In the two interviews, both conducted after her June appearance at the hearing, Hutchinson described how many of Trump’s allies, including her lawyer, pressured her not to say too much in her committee interviews.
Jan. 6 report: Trump ‘lit that fire’ of Capitol insurrection
The House Jan. 6 committee's report asserts that Donald Trump criminally engaged in a "multi-part conspiracy" to overturn the results of the 2020 election
Lit the fire translates to "didn't actually do it, others did", which means it's really hard to charge him. I suspect this is another case where they claim he did something wrong but can't prove anything criminal.
Well it does kind of read more like their talking points.. I think that the rhetoric he was using before the incident was no worse than what many democrats had been using and most recognize that. His slow response to shut it down is pretty despicable but not criminal.
What could or should he have done to shut it down ? There were a million odd people on the National Mall that day .
Tweeting to go home , a million people loitering around the Mall and inside and out of the Capital Building are studiously watching for tweets from Trump to go home . That for sure could have worked .
Does it matter? If half of them got the message that's still better than none of them getting the message. If even ONE got the message and told others around them "trump says we're special and we need to go home now" then he'd have tried something.
If your argument is that something has to be 100 percent effective instantly or it's not worth even trying, you're going to have a pretty hard time defending that logically.
The action is probably more important to the issue than the timeframe. His action was to do nothing. That's pretty sad. If his action had been to egg them on that would have been worse. If his action was to try to diffuse the situation then that would have been much better.
It's really not complicated. And this is kind of why trump is struggling this time around to gain support - people like you pretending that they can't understand something this simple as if it's some sort of majority complex issue. Makes the trump supporters look completely dishonest and that creates trust issues. He'd be far better off if supports like you simply said "yeah - he should have acted sooner but whatever, he didn't break the law. That would be more honest than "There's nothing even remotely possible in the entire universe he could have done differently!!!!! Oh the HUMANITY!!!!!"
Yeash. Of course he could have done better. A child can see that. If you're genuinely wondering how perhaps a 4th grader could explain it to you. BUT - that doesn't mean he did something criminal. So i suspect this is going to be another round of finger wagging with no charges.