1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Judge rules Justice Dept can admit evidence at trial in high-level Capitol riot case of Kyle Fitzimons:

Records of 4 calls made to two Congressional offices in Dec 2020 in which he referenced election fraud and indicated his belief that President Biden was not lawfully elected"

[Rick Plant]

Enrique Tarrio and Proud Boys members charged with seditious conspiracy for alleged Jan. 6 crimes



Washington – The leader of the far-right Proud Boys and four of the group's members have been charged with seditious conspiracy stemming from their alleged planning for and participation in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Enrique Tarrio, along with codefendants Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, are accused of conspiring to use force to oppose the lawful transfer of presidential power "by preventing, hindering, or delaying by force the execution of the laws governing the transfer of power," according to a grand jury indictment filed Monday.

The five men were previously indicted on charges of conspiracy and pleaded not guilty. Monday's indictment adds the even more serious "seditious" element to the counts, although many of the details in the new indictment had previously been alleged in the initial conspiracy charges.

According to the indictment, in December 2020, Tarrio and the Proud Boys members conspired to obstruct and stop the counting of the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6. An unnamed individual sent Tarrio a document entitled "1776 RETURNS," which described a plan to occupy multiple buildings in Washington, D.C., including congressional office buildings.

Using encrypted messaging programs, the indicted Proud Boys are accused of discussing their plans for the rally and beyond. One member of the group allegedly asked on Jan. 3, 2021, "What would they do if 1 million patriots stormed and too the capital building. Shoot into the crowd? I think not…They would do nothing because they can do nothing."

That same day, according to charging documents, an unidentified individual sent a voice message in the group chat and is accused of stating in part, "The main operating theater should be out in front of the house of representatives…plan the operations based around the front entrance of the Capitol building." Rehl allegedly responded, "good start."

In court documents filed Monday evening, Rehl's court-appointed attorney Carmen Hernandez asked the judge overseeing her client's case for permission to publicly comment on the new indictment, citing local court rules that limit attorneys' public disclosures.

"Without adding a single factual allegation concerning Mr. Rehl, the government today filed the Third Superseding Indictment in the instant case, nearly 1-1/2 years after Mr. Rehl was first indicted and detained pretrial and just two months before he is scheduled to begin trial," the filing reads in part.

She later wrote, "the worst that has been alleged against Mr. Rehl is that he has associated himself with the Proud Boys, a lawful fraternal association as is his right protected by the First Amendment." 

Tarrio and his codefendants are the second group to be accused of seditious conspiracy. They join Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and other accused members of the group previously charged with the most serious criminal charges in the sprawling Jan. 6 investigation. 

Also on Monday, documentarian Nick Quested of Goldcrest Films confirmed to CBS News that he will testify during Thursday's House January 6 Committee hearing. Quested was following Tarrio on Jan. 5, 2021, and captured a meeting with Tarrio and Oath Keepers' leader Stewart Rhodes in a D.C. hotel parking garage.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/enrique-tarrio-proud-boys-charged-seditious-conspiracy-january-6/

[Rick Plant]

Democrats must highlight GOP 'complicity' in insurrection during January 6 hearings: columnists

On Monday, writing for The Washington Post, columnists Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent emphasized that in order for the January 6 Committee's hearings to be successful, it must directly highlight the Republican Party's "complicity" in the efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the subsequent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

This comes amid reports that Republicans are preparing to gear up a PR offensive against the legitimacy of the committee's work — and former President Donald Trump himself is considering a public appearance of his own to pre-empt the proceedings.

"Democrats need a strategy to push back. Whatever they do should foreground a simple truth: Many Republicans were either complicit in Trump’s effort to destroy our constitutional order to remain in power illegitimately, have since worked hard to cover it up or both," they wrote. "So Republicans have zero credibility on these matters, and they should be granted zero standing to address them. Democrats need to say this clearly and forcefully."

This is necessary, they argued, to disarm the media's natural impulse to hold both sides culpable.

"We already know the media’s both-sidesing instincts are vulnerable to this kind of Republican manipulation, because we’ve seen it," they wrote. "Recall that, early on, there was talk of creating a bipartisan commission to examine Jan. 6. Republicans balked at the very idea that the commission should primarily examine the violent insurrection attempt, demanding that it also look at leftist violence, an absurdly transparent effort to muddy the waters. Then, after that commission died and Democrats set up the current select committee, McCarthy tried to appoint Trumpist arsonists such as Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Ind.). That was nothing more than a transparent effort to sabotage the committee’s work from within."

Ultimately, they argued, the whole GOP has to be put on trial.

"These Republicans, of course, have the right to make their case. But they don’t have a right to have their inevitably fantastical, bad-faith-saturated claims passed on to readers and viewers uncritically," they concluded. "Nor do they have the right to equal time. The committee will present the results of months of evidence-gathering, which will include extensive document examination and thousands of hours of interviews. Republicans rolling out bogus 'investigations' that are expressly designed to muddy the waters around legitimate congressional fact-finding into an effort to destroy our democracy don’t deserve the same volume of attention."

You can read more here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/06/gop-complicit-trump-coup/

[Rick Plant]

Jan. 6 hearing will feature Proud Boy documentarian embedded during the attack



According to a report from Politico, a British documentarian who was allowed to film Proud Boy members during some of their private conversations about the Jan 6th insurrection will be a featured witness when the House committee investigating the riot convenes its first hearing on Thursday.

Nick Quested and his crew were embedded with the far-right group on the day that Donald Trump's "Stop the Steal" rally preceded a march on the nation's Capitol that forced lawmakers to flee.

According to Politico's Kyle Cheney, "Quested captured some of the most harrowing and vivid footage from the front lines of the violence that day, including key moments of confrontation between members of the mob and Capitol Police just before rioters stormed the barricades. His crew was also present for key conversations among Proud Boys leaders, as well as a garage meeting between the group’s national chairman, Enrique Tarrio, and Stewart Rhodes, the founder of the Oath Keepers, whose group also played a central role in the January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Thursday hearing will also feature a multimedia presentation documenting the events of the day, as well as three associates of former vice president Mike Pence who will be key to the committee's case against the Trump White House.

Read more here:

https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/04-5-2022/candid-cameraman/

[Rick Plant]

A comprehensive timeline of Jan. 6 intelligence failures
https://www.rawstory.com/jan-6th-intelligence/

[Rick Plant]

Head of Trump Secret Service detail spoke with House investigators about Jan. 6: report

According to a report from Politico's Betsy Woodruff Swan, the head of former President Donald Trump's Secret Service detail on January 6, 2021, has already sat down with House committee members investigating the insurrection.

With the Washington Post reporting that Trump's protective detail was forced to scramble when he wanted to motorcade to the scene of the riot, the Politico report notes that agent Robert Engel has provided valuable information to the committee.

According to Woodruff Swan, Engel was "the special agent in charge on Jan. 6, 2021, meaning he was responsible for protecting the president from 'socks on to socks off' — the whole work day. In that role, he rode from the White House to that day’s 'Stop the Steal' rally with Trump in the presidential armored car called 'The Beast.'"

The report adds that the committee asked him about the day's details and "how the Secret Service handled the day’s chaos."

A Secret Service spokesperson confirmed the sit-down in a statement that said, "Every single member of the Secret Service who was requested by the committee has been provided to them. We fully support and are cooperating with the committee’s work. Employees, documentation, whatever is requested by the committee, we have cooperated with.”

A spokesperson for the committee refused comment on what was divulged, the report states.

Read more here:

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/07/jan-6-committee-interviews-head-of-trumps-secret-service-detail-on-day-of-capitol-attack-00037748

[Rick Plant]

How Mark Meadows may have been instrumental in the Jan. 6 attack

The role of then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in Donald Trump's efforts is examined in a new book by veteran journalists Peter Baker of The New York Times and his wife, Susan Glasser, of The New Yorker.

The book, The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021, was previewed by Glasser in her "Letter from Biden's Washington" column.

"Meadows and his two different personas are at the center of many of the controversies lingering since Trump’s tumultuous exit from office. The January 6th committee has discovered this duality. Meadows at first agreed to coöperate with the panel but then abruptly stopped after Trump castigated him for publishing a memoir, The Chief’s Chief, which airbrushed their history—though not sufficiently for Trump. The former President was furious with Meadows for revealing his lies, which Trump dismissed as 'Fake News,' to the public about the seriousness and timing of his October, 2020, bout with Covid," Glasser wrote.

The two found that Jan. 6 might not have happened were not for Meadows.

"Meadows’ remarkable ability, even for a politician, to do one thing while saying another has also been the subject of running news reports. My colleague Charles Bethea disclosed, in The New Yorker, that Trump’s chief of staff was publicly alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election while apparently committing voter fraud himself."

"Meadows registered to vote by absentee ballot in September, 2020, from a mobile home in North Carolina which he had never visited. North Carolina’s authorities have removed Meadows from the state’s voter rolls and are investigating his actions," she wrote. "In many ways, Meadows’s skill for obfuscation has delayed an inevitable reckoning about his role in enabling Trump’s post-election conduct. But the evidence is now much clearer that Meadows’s actions in the White House at this crucial moment not only mattered but might well have been decisive. It’s very possible, in fact, that the tragedy of January 6th might never have happened had it not been for Trump’s final chief of staff."

The two also reported that Meadows "consolidated power" and excluded then-Vice President Mike Pence from meetings.

Read more here:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/mark-meadows-was-trumps-matador-for-his-fake-election-lies

[Rick Plant]

U.S. Capitol assault hearings to open with injured police officer and filmmaker



A police officer hurt by Donald Trump supporters trying to overturn his election defeat and a filmmaker who recorded some leaders of the U.S. Capitol riot will be among the first witnesses when hearings into the assault begin on Thursday, organizers said.

The Democratic-led U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee will attempt to reverse Republican efforts to downplay or deny the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, with five months to go until Nov. 8 midterm elections that will determine which party controls Congress for the next two years.

The committee's first public hearing will begin on Thursday at 8 p.m. ET, a prime time spot intended to capture the attention of as many Americans as possible, to be shown live on major networks including NBC, ABC and CBS.

U.S. Capitol Officer Caroline Edwards, who sustained a traumatic brain injury that has so far prevented her from returning to her previous duties, and Nick Quested, a filmmaker who has captured footage of the right-wing group Proud Boys and documented events that morning, are due to appear.

Five further hearings are expected in the next two weeks.

Four people died the day of the attack, one fatally shot by police and the others of natural causes. Four police officers later took their own lives and more than 100 were injured.

© Reuters