1/6 Insurrection Investigation

[Rick Plant]

Preliminary hearing set for August 9 in Capitol riot case of William Mellors.

Mellors is accused of deploying bear spray at police officers.

[Rick Plant]

Sentencing today in Washington DC for first Capitol riot defendant convicted at trial.

Feds seek 15 years in prison for Guy Reffitt of Texas who carried a gun amid the mob.

[Rick Plant]

Man Who Assaulted Capitol Police On January 6 Gets Five Years In Prison

A Trump supporter who assaulted police officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, because he believed the former president's lies about the 2020 presidential election was sentenced to more than five years in prison Tuesday.

Watch:

[Rick Plant]

Capitol rioter will 'almost certainly get the longest Jan. 6 sentence to date' after son delivered devastating testimony



Capitol rioter Guy Reffitt who was found guilty of multiple felonies earlier this year, is receiving his prison sentence this week -- and NBC News reporter Ryan Reilly believes it's going to be the stiffest January 6-related prison sentence yet.

Writing on Twitter, Reilly translates some legalese delivered by Judge Dabney Friedrich in which she said she was setting his offense level at 29 as the basis of her sentencing decision.

"Translation: Guy Reffitt is almost certainly to get the longest Jan. 6 sentence to date, it's just a matter of how many years he'll get on top of the current 5.25 year (63 month) record for Jan. 6 cases," writes Reilly.

A level 29 offense carries a sentencing range of between 87 and 108 months in prison, which means the judge would have to radically depart from guidelines for him to not break the current record for January 6 defendants.

Reffitt became infamous earlier this year when his own son, Jackson Reffitt, testified against him at his trial.

Among other things, Jackson Reffitt said his father sent messages to the family promoting a new civil war, while also talking about "rising up" and "destroying" the United States government.

In all, Guy Reffitt was found guilty on charges of transporting a firearm in furtherance of civil disorder, guilty of obstruction of justice, guilty of entering the Capitol with a firearm, and guilty of obstruction law enforcement officers.

Read More Here: https://twitter.com/ryanjreilly/status/1554132660326469637

[Rick Plant]

Capitol rioter's daughter subtly implicates Trump in plea for leniency at sentencing hearing



The daughter of a convicted Capitol rioter pleaded for leniency for her father on Monday -- and subtly implicated former President Donald Trump in the process.

WUSA9's Roger Fischer reports that Peyton Reffitt, the daughter of January 6 defendant Guy Reffitt, said that her father didn't deserve to bear the harshest punishment for his actions, as he was incited by former President Donald Trump to storm the Capitol building.

"My father's name wasn't on the flags that everyone was carrying that day," she said. "It was another man's name. [My father] wasn't the leader."

Regardless, Reffitt appears to be in line to receive the harshest prison sentence yet handed down to a January 6th defendant, as the baseline guidelines for his offense level recommend a sentence of between 87 and 108 months in prison.

Reffitt became infamous earlier this year when his own son, Jackson Reffitt, testified against him at his trial.

Among other things, Jackson Reffitt said his father sent messages to the family promoting a new civil war, while also talking about "rising up" and "destroying" the United States government.

In all, Guy Reffitt was found guilty on charges of transporting a firearm in furtherance of civil disorder, guilty of obstruction of justice, guilty of entering the Capitol with a firearm, and guilty of obstruction law enforcement officers.

https://twitter.com/JordanOnRecord/status/1554150804378062850

[Rick Plant]

House leaders demand interviews with Homeland Security watchdog over Secret Service 'cover up': report



On Monday, the Associated Press reported that House investigators want to speak with the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security, alleging a "cover-up" about the Secret Service's missing text messages about the January 6 attack.

"The leaders of the powerful House Oversight and Homeland Security committees wrote a letter to Inspector General Joseph Cuffari on Monday, detailing the urgent need for interviews with his staff regarding new evidence of alleged efforts to cover up the erasure of Secret Service communications," reported Farnoush Amiri. "'We are writing with grave new concerns over your lack of transparency and independence, which appear to be jeopardizing the integrity of a crucial investigation run by your office,' House Oversight Chair Carolyn Maloney and Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson wrote in the letter. They also renewed their calls for Cuffari to recuse himself from investigations of the erased texts."

Thompson also chairs the House Select Committee on January 6.

"The committees said it has obtained evidence that shows the inspector general's office first learned of the missing Secret Service text messages, as part of its investigation into the attack on the U.S. Capitol, in May 2021. And that emails between top DHS IG officials show the agency decided to abandon efforts to recover those text messages in July 2021, nearly a year before they first informed Congress they were erased," said the report. "'These documents raise troubling new concerns that your office not only failed to notify Congress for more than a year that critical evidence in this investigation was missing, but your senior staff deliberately chose not to pursue that evidence and then appear to have taken steps to cover up these failures,' the letter continued."

This comes after a recent report that the inspector general's office abandoned a plan in February to try to retrieve the missing text messages. It also comes as high-ranking Secret Service officials come under scrutiny over their ties to former President Donald Trump.

House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff (D-CA) has separately said he would like Secret Service officials to explain under oath how the text messages, which are supposed to be protected federal records, came to be deleted in the first place.

Read More Here: https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Dems-allege-cover-up-on-Secret-Service-texts-17344136.php

[Rick Plant]

How the Secret Service directly witnessed Trump's effort to 'crown himself president again' — and the lost texts could be key



On Friday, MSNBC's Chris Hayes delved deep into the new reporting on further missing text messages within the Trump administration — and the significance of the matter to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

One of the key points, Hayes argued, is that the Secret Service was allegedly a direct witness to former President Donald Trump and his allies as they schemed to overturn the presidential election — and the missing messages are at a crucial point of those events.

"Well, there are even more missing texts," said Hayes. "The Washington Post now reporting that text messages related to January 6 from Donald Trump's acting Secretary of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf, and acting Deputy Secretary, Ken Cuccinelli, have vanished. That's in addition to all the Secret Service text messages related to the 6th that have also gone missing. For an ostensibly apolitical organization like the Secret Service, this has become an enormous scandal. And this is the latest in Trump's attempt to overturn the will of voters, to end American democracy."

"The January 6 Committee has provided quite a bit of evidence showing that Trump wanted to use the Secret Service as a personal armed guard," said Hayes. "That he wanted to lead the mob personally to the Capitol, during insurrection, in order to ... disrupt the peaceful transfer of power. And make that the final step and basically crown himself president again. And he wanted the Secret Service to help him. Now we know that Trump was aware of the fact that much of the mob was armed. Trump apparently wanted the Secret Service to remove the metal detectors at the speech on the ellipse, where he incited the riot."

The missing messages, said Hayes, could highlight exactly what key Secret Service officials saw — and many of them appear unwilling to discuss it.

"All this speaks, of course, to how central the Secret Service was to the full picture of Donald Trump's attempted coup," said Hayes. "We know they were deeply involved in tracking, and planning, for both Trump and Pence during, before, and after the insurrection. But despite this, it appears the January 6 committee knows surprisingly little about the Secret Service's internal deliberations from that time. When the agents were doing and saying. Last month, for example, committeemember Congressman Stephanie Murphy from Florida, said that Tony Ornato is a key figure because he served as both a deputy White House chief of operations and head of Trump's Secret Service detail, and was not forthcoming to his testimony with the committee. Especially compared to Mark Meadows aide, Cassidy Hutchinson."

Watch below:

[Rick Plant]

Son of jailed Capitol rioter says Trump should 'absolutely' get prison time



Appearing on CNN's "New Day," the son of a Jan. 6 Capitol rioter said his father deserved the harsh prison sentence that he received on Monday -- and that Donald Trump should join him in jail.

Speaking with host Brianna Keilar, Jackson Reffitt was asked how he felt about his father, Guy Reffitt of Texas, who was sentenced to 87 months in jail for carrying a weapon to the Capitol after attending the "Stop the Steal" rally at the behest of the former president.

Parting company with his mother who claimed after the sentencing that the Capitol attackers -- including Ashli Babbitt -- were "patriots," Jackson Reffitt called out the "off the rails" violence of the day after being asked about his father's upcoming jail time.

"How are you feeling? How are you reacting to this sentence?" host Keilar asked.

"I mean, I'm not happy at all, I haven't been happy to this whole situation. No one in my family has either, but to say I'm surprised would be a lie," he replied. "I mean, everything my dad did, he's his own person and his action has consequences, but I'm not happy at all."

"Do you think he deserves this length of the sentence?" the CNN host pressed.

"I mean, absolutely, he deserves some time," he replied. "Whether to -- for anything, to rehabilitate, for his mental health, he deserves a lot of safety nets. But, yes, he does."

"It seems like, you know, your sister Peyton, listening to her, she feels kind of caught in the middle of this," Keilar prompted. "She's there at the courthouse, she loves you, she made that clear yesterday. She thinks that your dad, if he's getting this time, that Trump should be getting some time. What do you say to that?"

Reffitt, who turned his father in, shot back, "Absolutely. When she said that, I was flabbergasted. Not only was I impressed with her, she's so right."

"My dad was used as a puppet, and thousands of families have been," he continued. "Whether you agree with that, it's a fact at this point. It is disgusting to see that someone with practically money and social power can just get away with manipulating thousands of people just for whatever reason and have no outcome."

Watch the video below: