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Trump Calls Hearings into January 6 Attack a ‘Theatrical Production’

Former U.S. President Donald Trump Friday sharply criticized the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, in his first appearance since the committee began its public hearings.

Speaking to a gathering of religious conservatives in Nashville, Tennessee, Trump said, “Let’s be clear, this is not a congressional investigation — this horrible situation that’s wasting everyone’s time.”

“This is a theatrical production of partisan political fiction that’s getting these terrible, terrible ratings and they’re going crazy,” he added.

The hearings have laid out how the attack on the Capitol occurred and Trump’s role in it by inviting his supporters to come to Washington and “fight like hell” to keep him in office.

In the latest day of hearings, on Thursday, witnesses presented testimony that Trump repeatedly pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to thwart Congress from certifying that Democrat Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election, even after being repeatedly advised that it was illegal to do so.

Pence was presiding over Congress as lawmakers were in the initial stages of the state-by-state count of Electoral College votes to verify Biden’s victory when about 2,000 Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to disrupt the proceeding.

Trump, in private and publicly at a rally near the White House just before Congress convened, implored Pence to reject the electoral count from states where Biden narrowly won and send the results back to the states so that Republican-controlled legislatures could order another election or submit the names of Trump electors to replace those favoring Biden.

Pence, a Trump loyalist during their four years in the White House, refused Trump’s demands, saying his role was limited by the Constitution to simply open the envelopes containing the Electoral College vote counts from each state.

Trump criticized Pence again on Friday for failing to stop the vote certification, saying, “Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic.”

However, he said, “Mike did not have the courage to act.”

The House committee investigating the attack showed a brief video clip Thursday of Marc Short, who served as Pence’s chief of staff, saying that Pence told Trump “many times” that he did not have the authority to overturn the Biden victory.

Pence counsel Greg Jacob described to the committee how a conservative Trump lawyer, John Eastman, tried to convince Pence that he had the legal authority to unilaterally upend the election. But Jacob said Eastman eventually conceded that the  Supreme Court would likely unanimously reject his legal theory.

Earlier this week, the House panel showed videotaped testimony from numerous White House and political aides saying they told Trump on election night to hold off on declaring victory, advice he ignored when he declared victory in the early hours of Nov. 4, 2020.

Former Attorney General William Barr and numerous aides have told the committee that in the weeks between the election and the insurrection, they told Trump his election fraud claims were baseless and that he had lost the election.

Trump continued to assert Friday that he won the 2020 election and insisted that he did nothing wrong after the vote.

He hinted that he would again run for president, asking the cheering crowd “Would anybody like me to run for president?”

On Monday, Trump issued a 12-page statement calling the Jan. 6 investigation an attempt by Democrats to prevent him from running again for president in 2024.

Some information in this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters.
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US County That Alleged Vote Machine Fraud Certifies Election Results

A Republican-controlled county commission in New Mexico that refused to recognize election returns this month after citing unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machines bowed to legal pressure on Friday and certified the results. 

Otero County commissioners voted 2-1 to certify the county’s June 7 primary election results, but only after the New Mexico Supreme Court ordered them to do so and after threats of legal action by the state’s Democratic attorney general. 

The commissioner who still voted against certifying the results, Couy Griffin, did so hours after being sentenced for breaching the U.S. Capitol during the January 6, 2021, riot. 

Griffin, an election-fraud conspiracist and founder of “Cowboys for Trump,” avoided jail time, was fined $3,000 and was given one year of supervised release with the requirement that he complete 60 hours of community service. 

Election falsehoods

Former Republican President Donald Trump has continued to push falsehoods that Democratic President Joe Biden stole the 2020 election. Many Republicans believe Trump even after revelations in a congressional hearing this month that the former president’s own daughter and other close allies rejected the falsehoods. 

There are fears of more election turmoil ahead because of the hold that unfounded conspiracy theories about voting machines and vote counts now have on many Republican lawmakers and grassroots Republican voters. 

Otero County’s initial move not to certify its votes comes ahead of the November midterm elections that will decide control of the U.S. Congress, with both chambers now narrowly held by Democrats, as well as the 2024 presidential election, in which Trump has indicated he could seek a second White House term. 

U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of 10 House of Representatives Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the deadly January 6 attack, said Otero’s initial refusal to certify was a worrying harbinger of election turmoil ahead. 

“Wake up America and GOP, this will destroy us,” Kinzinger, a member of the congressional commission investigating the January 6 attack, tweeted on Wednesday. 

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver, who had previously said the county commission was acting illegally, expressed relief that the elections results had been certified. 

“The voters of Otero County and the candidates who duly won their primaries can now rest assured that their voices have been heard and the general election can proceed as planned,” Toulouse Oliver said in a statement. 
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Trump Directed $250 Million in Donations to Leadership PAC 

Former U.S. President Donald Trump raised $250 million in donations in the weeks after the November 2020 presidential election for an organization ostensibly intended to fund court challenges in support of his false claims that the election was fraudulent. Instead, he directed that money to an unrelated political action committee, or PAC, according to congressional investigators.

In its second hearing about its findings, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol made the case that the former president knew that he had lost the election but continued raising money from his supporters by sending out appeals for donations to an Election Defense Fund.

The committee played recordings of depositions given by former employees of Trump’s campaign, one of whom said, “I don’t believe there is actually a fund called the Election Defense Fund.”

Another former Trump campaign staffer said the fund was simply a “marketing tactic.”

Money went to leadership PAC

The committee said some of the money Trump’s campaign raised in the weeks after the election went to paying down campaign debt and into the coffers of the Republican National Committee. A large amount also went to a new leadership PAC called Save America, which was formed three days after the election.

Under law, politicians with leadership PACs have broad latitude to spend the money they collect as they see fit.

Created in the 1970s, leadership PACs were originally intended to let political candidates raise money that they could use to support other candidates and political causes. But according to Robert Maguire, research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), vagueness in the law has meant the PACs are often used for other causes.

“What they’ve become, in many cases, are essentially slush funds,” Maguire told VOA.

“We’ve had problems for years with members of Congress using leadership PAC money to pay for luxury hotel stays, private jet flights, rounds of golf and exclusive membership-only golf courses,” he said, all within the bounds of the law.

Spending connected to Trump allies

Amanda Wick, a senior investigative counsel with the Jan. 6 committee, said in a recorded statement that the new PAC “made millions of dollars of contributions to pro-Trump organizations.”

She said they included a $1 million contribution to the Conservative Partnership Institute, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’ charitable foundation; $1 million to the America First Policy Institute, an organization employing “several former Trump administration officials”; $204,857 to the Trump Hotel Collection, and more than $5 million to Event Strategies Inc., the organization that managed Trump’s rally on the morning of Jan. 6.

“Throughout the committee’s investigation, we found evidence that the Trump campaign and its surrogates misled donors as to where their funds would go and what they would be used for,” said Democratic Representative Zoe Lofgren, who serves on the committee.

Calling the contributions a “big rip-off,” Lofgren added, “Donors deserve to know where their funds are really going. They deserve better than what President Trump and his team did.”

Unethical but not illegal

Campaign finance experts say Trump’s solicitation of funds for a nonexistent Election Defense Fund, and subsequent direction of that money to his leadership PAC was unethical, but probably stopped short of outright illegality.

“There’s certainly a long list of examples of politicians and political committees stretching the truth or using inflammatory messaging in order to raise money,” campaign finance expert Brendan Fischer told VOA. “But I think what the Trump campaign was doing in the wake of the 2020 election brought it to another level.”

Fischer, an attorney and the deputy executive director at Documented, an investigative watchdog group, said donors were told their money was going to support a legal challenge.

“But in reality, the money raised went towards paying down the Trump campaign’s debt, funding the Republican Party and financing Trump’s newly created PAC, Save America. So, it was extremely messy. It went beyond the typical tenor of misleading fundraising appeals into something close to outright fraud.”

Maguire of CREW said there were “very clear” ethical problems with how Trump raised the money. But he said the fundraising effort was probably legal.

“These kinds of statements and fundraising appeals are pretty well lawyered,” he said, noting that the appeals appeared to contain fine print that left the Trump campaign the leeway to use the money as it saw fit.

Other groups focused on the ethical problems with Trump’s approach.

“It was grift, pure and simple, but on a massive scale,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause, in a prepared statement. “Donald Trump was not content to just ignore the will of the American people and attempt to steal the 2020 election in a wide-ranging criminal conspiracy. He was determined to make a lot of money doing it.”

Trump comments

Trump did not comment on the $250 million the committee claims he raised after the election. But he issued a 12-page statement June 13 criticizing the committee, which he characterized as a “Kangaroo Court.”

“Seventeen months after the events of January 6th, Democrats are unable to offer solutions,” he wrote. “They are desperate to change the narrative of a failing nation, without even making mention of the havoc and death caused by the Radical Left just months earlier. Make no mistake, they control the government. They own this disaster. They are hoping that these hearings will somehow alter their failing prospects.”
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False Theory Fueled Trump Pressure Campaign on Pence

In the third day of congressional hearings on the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, U.S. lawmakers alleged former President Donald Trump waged a multiweek pressure campaign on his vice president, Mike Pence, to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election. VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.
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Lawmakers Ask Ginni Thomas, Wife of Supreme Court Justice, to Testify

The House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol has asked Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, for an interview, the panel’s chairman said Thursday afternoon. 

Thomas, a conservative activist, communicated with people in President Donald Trump’s orbit ahead of the attack and on the day of the insurrection, when hundreds of Trump’s supporters violently stormed the Capitol and interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. 

“We have sent Ms. Thomas a letter, asking her to come and talk to the committee,” Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chairman of the panel, told reporters after a three-hour public hearing Thursday. He didn’t specify a time or date for an interview. 

The chairman said her name could also come up at some point in the panel’s hearings that are being held throughout June. 

Earlier in the day, Thompson and committee vice chair Liz Cheney had both said it was time for her to come in voluntarily and provide testimony to the nine-member panel after investigators discovered information that refers to Thomas — known as Ginni — in communications they have obtained relating to one of Trump’s lawyers, John Eastman. 

‘Can’t wait’

In response, Thomas told the conservative news site Daily Caller on Thursday that she “can’t wait to clear up misconceptions,” suggesting she would comply with a request to testify. 

Eastman, who was advising Trump in the weeks and days ahead of the attack, was a central figure in the committee’s third public hearing Thursday. Lawmakers laid out their case regarding the pressure campaign Trump waged, with a legal assist from Eastman, against then-Vice President Mike Pence to try to get him to object or delay Biden’s certification on January 6. 

On his blog, Eastman posted a single email from Thomas on December 4, 2020, in which she asks Eastman for a status update for a group she describes as “grassroots state leaders.” 

“OMG, Mrs. Thomas asked me to give an update about election litigation to her group. Stop the Presses!” the headline on the blog post reads. 

Eastman also said he never discussed with either of the Thomases “any matters pending or likely to come before the Court.” 

Thomas did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Associated Press. 

It is not the first time that members of the panel have said they want to talk to Thomas.  

In March, lawmakers on the committee said they were considering inviting her for a witness interview about text messages with White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on the day of the attack. But she still has not spoken to the panel. 

Critical of panel

She has been critical of the January 6 committee and signed a letter with other conservatives calling on House Republicans to expel Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger from the GOP conference for joining the panel. 

Thomas also urged Republican lawmakers in Arizona to choose their own slate of electors after the 2020 election, arguing that results giving Biden a victory in the state were marred by fraud. 

She has acknowledged she attended the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally on the Ellipse but left before Trump spoke and his supporters later stormed the Capitol. 

Justice Thomas was the only member of the Supreme Court who voted against the court’s order allowing the January 6 committee to obtain Trump records that were held by the National Archives and Records Administration. The court voted in January to allow the committee to get the documents. 

The court on Thursday did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the justice. 

The emails between Eastman and Thomas were first reported by The Washington Post.  
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