Jan 6 hearings: Trump-linked lawyer compares FBI to Stasi, as ex-president’s call to Putin revealed

Alex Holder interviewed Donald Trump in the days immediately after January 6.

The documentarian, who spoke with Mr Trump and other top campaign figures for the forthcoming documentary series Unprecedented, says the president seemed to see post-election violence as an “inevitability.”

“If you’re telling 75 million people that their election doesn’t count and they believe you, you’re their president, they voted for you, then what else is gonna happen?” he said in an interview on CBS News on Thursday.

“I think the president saw it as an invetability, in that the people who were there were doing what they thought was correct, that they were fighting for their election, for their votes to be counted,” he continued.

The British filmmaker had been following the final days of the Trump election push for the series, and said Mr Trump’s rhetoric was growing increasingly violent.

“The volume of rhetoric and sort of the belligerence that was coming out post-election was so signifincant that, in my mind, it had to end with something violent,” he said.

“To me, January 6 doesn’t happy by itself.” Watch the full interview here.

And here’s Andrew Buncombe’s profile of Mr Holder.

Ivanka Trump wanted her father to continue fighting the 2020 election result well into December, new documentary footage shows, contradicting her testimony in the recent 6 January hearings that she quickly accepted Donald Trump’s election loss.

The former president’s daughter wanted Mr Trump to “continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted,” she told a film crew in mid-December, as part of a yet-to-be-released documentary.

“As the president has said, every single vote needs to be counted and needs to be heard, and he campaigned for the voiceless,” Ms Trump said in an interview for the forthcoming series Unprecendented, according to footage obtained by CNN.

Here’s the clip, which was released this Thursday.

Read more about Ms Trump’s testimony to the January 6 hearings in our story from earlier this week.

British filmmaker Alex Holder told CBS News in an interview on Thursday night that President Donald Trump saw the violence of January 6 as an “inevitablity” and was “jovial” in the hours following the Capitol riot.

Mr Holder, whose documentary footage was reviewed by the Jan 6 committee, testified today behind closed doors about what he saw while following Mr Trump and his inner circle during the months leading up to and following the 2020 election.

Following his testimony and the public release of select footage from his upcoming three-part documentary series set to premiere on Discovery Plus later this summer, Mr Holder spoke to CBS News — telling host Norah O’Donnell that he predicted the violence of January 6.

“The volume of rhetoric and sort of the belligerence that was coming out post the election was so significant that, in my mind, it eventually had to end with something violent,” Mr Holder said. “Even if you look at the way the campaign was going on before, the idea of the election being something that was going to be irregular was already coming up during that time as well. So to me, January 6 doesn’t happen by itself.”

Abe Asher has all the details.

Each day, it seems like American politics are getting more and more violent.

We’ve got multiple stories today of politicians and those tied to Washington facing death threats for their positions.

January 6, hopefully, was the peak of an increasingly violent era of US politics, but it doesn’t seem to be the end of it.

Thursday’s special January 6 committee hearings revealed Donald Trump was moments away from a repeat of president Richard Nixon’s infamous “Saturday Night Massacre,” when a number of top Justice Department officials resigned rather than futher the coverup of the Watergate scandal.

Donald Trump narrowly avoided such a fate, officials testified on Thursday.

He and his allies spent months pushing to elevate to acting attorney general an obscure Justice Department named Jeffrey Clark, who was urging the DOJ to declare the 2020 elections suspect and encourage state officials to send illegitimate slates of pro-Trump electors.

Things came to a head when DOJ leadership met with Donald Trump in the White House. They warned they would resign en masse if Mr Clark was given more power, along with hundreds of colleagues.

“The leadership would be gone. Jeff Clark would be leading a graveyard,” former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told the president, he testified.

That would be Alex Holder, who filmed the forthcoming series Unprecedented in the moments just before and after 6 January.

The film, which includes interviews with Donald Trump, his children, and election experts, has now been examined by committee members.

Andrew Buncombe had this look at the director behind it.

The January 6 hearings aren’t the only piece of TV Trump is worried about.

Unprecedented, a forthcoming docuseries featuring interviews with Donald Trump and others, has rattled those in his inner circle.

Graig Graziosi has the details.

During Thursday’s January 6 hearings, committee members played testimony revealing which Republicans sought pardons from president Trump for their involvement in efforts to overturn the election.

Among them was Florida’s Matt Gaetz.

Watch the evidence below.

Proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen are currently facing a very public reckoning. Millions of Americans are tuning in to watch the January 6 House committee outline evidence of a concerted effort by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election.

But another reckoning, largely out of view until now, may yet take place for the people and institutions that promoted those lies. In the courts, right wing media companies that broadcast false claims about voting machines being rigged are being hit with billion-dollar lawsuits — and they are not going away.

At the centre of these lawsuits are two voting machine companies whose equipment was used in the 2020 election: Dominion and Smartmatic. They are in the process of suing Fox News, Fox News’s parent company, and upstart pro-Trump news outlets Newsmax and One America News (OAN), for billions of dollars collectively.

The most high-profile of those cases targets the heart of the Murdoch dynasty. Dominion has claimed that Fox Corp, the parent company of Fox News, allowed false claims about the company to be broadcast on its news outlet, and that Chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son Chief Executive Lachlan Murdoch allowed that coverage to continue knowing those claims to be false.

Read Richard Hall’s full report.

Actor Sean Penn was in the gallery on Thursday to take in the January 6 hearings, sitting alongside DC police officers who were attacked during the riots at the Capitol.

Here’s what happened.