Trump news: Rattled Trump lashes out as Jan 6 panel finishes investigation and tax return release looms

Donald Trump’s Secretary of Defence Mark Esper was fired by the president via White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on 9 November 2020. In his deposition for the January 6 committee, he explained what happened:

“I was informed by Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the — around lunchtime on November 9th. And his basic message was something along the lines that I was being terminated because I was insufficiently loyal or not loyal enough to the President. And I responded that my oath was to the Constitution and not to the President.”

Donald Trump Jr has come under fire for posting a lewd meme of Volodymyr Zelensky and Nancy Pelosi after the Ukrainian president’s visit to Washington DC.

The one-term president’s son mocked the Ukrainian leader, whom his father was impeached for trying to extort for information about Joe Biden, with the fake image on Instagram.

Graeme Massie reports.

In total, 187 minutes elapsed between the time Donald Trump finished his speech at the Ellipse and his first effort to get the rioters to disperse, through an eventual video message 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 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. And 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 a tweet by Trump at 2:24 p.m. that day — 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.

AP

Kinzinger calls McCarthy ‘unsung hero’ of Jan 6 committee

Republican Rep Adam Kinzinger has called GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy the “unsung hero” of the January 6 committee.

He tweeted that the decision by Mr McCarthy to pull his choices to participate in the investigation into the Capitol riot allowed for a smooth bipartisan process and presentation.

“Thanks Kevin!”

The massive, damning report comes as Donald 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 said it will release his tax returns after he has fought for years to keep them private. And 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.

In a series of policy recommendations, the seven Democrats and two Republicans on the committee suggest that Trump should be barred from future office, noting 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.

“He 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, though, and noted that he followed that comment with election falsehoods and charged language exhorting the crowd to “fight like hell.”

AP

Trump tax returns will not be released until next week, report says

Charlie Savage, national security and legal reporter for The New York Times, has tweeted that the Ways & Means Committee will not be releasing the raw Trump tax return documents until next week.

Think of it as a treat to look forward to between Christmas and New Year.

As plans formed for the “Save America” rally at which Donald Trump exhorted his followers to march from the White House to the Capitol, the panel found there had been “a series of calls among the senior White House staff, likely underscoring the seriousness of the White House’s interest in the event”.

The committee found the Trump White House started to have “a more direct role” in rally planning, with both outside organisers and executive branch staffers laying the groundwork for a march to the Capitol following Mr Trump’s remarks.

Event producer Justin Caporale wrote in a 29 December text to rally organiser Caroline Wren that following the speech, there would perhaps be “a call to action” for Mr Trump’s followers to “march to the Capitol and make noise”.

The panel added that the text message was “the earliest indication uncovered by the select committee that the president planned to call on his supporters to march” from the White House to the Capitol.

Four days later, there was another text message, from organiser Katrina Pierson to Wren, which noted that then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows had said Mr Trump planned to “call on everyone to march to the Capitol”.

Rachel Sharp and Andrew Feinberg have been reviewing the key findings of the committee’s full report.

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. “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.”

AP

The Department of Justice is not allowing the Senate Intelligence Committee nor congressional leaders from accessing information related to former President Donald Trump’s cache of highly classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate, Punchbowl News reports.

The Justice Department’s position has alarmed lawmakers as prosecutors had previously suggested in court filings that they intended to share such information with as part of their regular oversight duties.

Senator Mark Warner, the intelligence committee’s Democratic chair, and Senator Marco Rubio, the vice chair and senior Republican, said DOJ’s newly-appointed special counsel for Trump-related investigations, Jack Smith, has raised doubts about sharing information related to the Mar-a-Lago probe with Congress.

Senator Rubio told Punchbowl: “We’re not asking to interfere in whatever investigation they claim to be carrying out. We’re looking to have oversight over whatever the intelligence information was, which they have no right to deny us access to… If in fact this was the severe counterintelligence threat that they claim it was, we certainly have a right to understand what it was and why we were not alerted to it.”