Trump Sounds Pretty Panicked About Congress Finding Out Exactly What He Was Up to on January 6 - Vanity Fair

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He’s fighting the House select committee like a guy with an incredible amount to hide.

By Bess Levin

October 19, 2021

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, Donald Trump is extremely unhappy about the work being performed by the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, presumably because he knows that what they find will make him look even worse than he already does, which is saying a lot given he already looks like a guy who tried to overthrow the government because his parents never hugged him as a child. Unfortunately for Trump, Joe Biden thinks it’s actually very important for Congress to have access to the information it has requested concerning the days surrounding the insurrection, and earlier this month rejected his predecessor’s claim of executive privilege over the documents in question. So now, instead of letting the investigation unfold like an innocent person with nothing to hide would, Trump has instead sicced his lawyers on the government.

Per The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump sued Congress and the National Archives on Monday, seeking to block the disclosure of White House files related to his actions and communications surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In a 26-page complaint, a lawyer for Mr. Trump argued that the materials must remain secret as a matter of executive privilege. He said the Constitution gives the former president the right to demand their confidentiality even though he is no longer in office—and even though President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over them.

The lawsuit touches off what is likely to be a major legal battle between Mr. Trump and the House committee investigating the attack, in which a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol seeking to disrupt Congress’s counting of electoral votes to formalize Mr. Biden’s victory. Its outcome will carry consequences for how much the panel can uncover about Mr. Trump’s role in the riot, pose thorny questions for the Biden administration and potentially forge new precedents about presidential prerogatives and the separation of powers.

In what is now basically boilerplate language for Trump and his allies, his lawyer Jesse Binnall claimed in the complaint that Biden is simply sucking up to liberal Democrats who want to see Trump, a noted saint who’s never done anything wrong in his life, held accountable. “In a political ploy to accommodate his partisan allies, President Biden has refused to assert executive privilege over numerous clearly privileged documents requested by the committee,” Binnall wrote. In response, committee leaders Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney called Trump’s suit “nothing more than an attempt to delay and obstruct our probe,” adding: “It’s hard to imagine a more compelling public interest than trying to get answers about an attack on our democracy and an attempt to overturn the results of an election.” Trump’s suit names Thompson and David Ferriero, the head of the National Archives, as defendants.

In explaining why “executive privilege” does not extend to a guy who tried to have the results of a free and fair election overturned, White House attorney Dana Remus told the National Archives, “The constitutional protections of executive privilege should not be used to shield, from Congress or the public, information that reflects a clear and apparent effort to subvert the Constitution itself.” While Trump and his lawyer have claimed that allowing Congress to access supposedly privileged information about what he was up to on January 6 would “destroy the very fabric of our constitutional separation of powers,” Remus has said Biden believes that, given the extenuating circumstances of having POTUS try to gain a second term by force, Congress needs “full accounting” of the “unprecedented effort to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power” to “ensure nothing similar ever happens again.”

Among the documents Congress has requested are schedules, calendars, and movement logs about virtual or in-person meetings or events Trump attended and who was present; communications between the White House and some Trump allies who pushed to overturn the election, including Rudy Giuliani, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Stephen Bannon; White House communications with Mike Lindell, a.k.a. MyPillow guy, who has spent the last year spreading baseless conspiracy theories about election fraud; and records on militias and extremist groups that were at the Capitol on the day of the attack, including the Proud Boys, QAnon, and the Oath Keepers. As the Times notes, Trump urged his followers to descend on Washington for his “Stop the Steal” rally, and at the gathering near the White House, instructed them to “fight much harder” against “bad people” and “show strength” at the Capitol. And that’s just what he said in public. (In private, he reportedly did everything he could to get Mike Pence to block the certification of Biden’s win, and “engaged in an intensive effort to use the Justice Department to invalidate the election results.”)

Trump has told at least four former aides and advisers to ignore subpoenas from Congress, and at least one of them, Bannon, has followed the orders of his old boss. Which doesn’t appear to be working out so well for him. Per the Associated Press:

A House committee tasked with investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection is moving swiftly Tuesday to hold at least one of Donald Trump’s allies in contempt as the former president is pushing back on the probe in a new lawsuit. Trump is aggressively trying to block the committee’s work by directing former White House aide Steve Bannon not to answer questions in the probe while also suing the panel to try to prevent Congress from obtaining former White House documents. But lawmakers on the House committee say they will not back down as they gather facts and testimony about the attack involving Trump’s supporters that left dozens of police officers injured, sent lawmakers running for their lives and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

In a resolution released Monday, and scheduled to be voted out of the panel on Tuesday, the committee asserts that the former Trump aide and podcast host has no legal standing to rebuff the committee—even as Trump’s lawyer has argued that Bannon should not disclose information because it is protected by the privilege of the former president’s office. Bannon was a private citizen when he spoke to Trump ahead of the attack, the committee said, and Trump has not asserted any such executive privilege claims to the panel itself.

Once the committee votes on the Bannon contempt measure, it will go to the full House for a vote and then on to the Justice Department, which would decide whether to prosecute.

“Mr. Bannon appears to have played a multi-faceted role in the events of January 6th, and the American people are entitled to hear his first-hand testimony regarding his actions,” the committee wrote in the resolution, which lists the many ways he was involved in the lead-up to the attack on the Capitol, including reports he told Trump to focus his efforts on January 6, and his remarks on January 5 that “all hell is going to break loose” the next day.

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Anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller wanted to send 250,000 troops to the southern border because of course he did

Luckily, military brass shot down the idea. Per the New York Times:

In the spring of 2020, Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary, was alarmed to learn of an idea under discussion at a top military command and at the Department of Homeland Security to send as many as 250,000 troops — more than half the active U.S. Army, and a sixth of all American forces — to the southern border in what would have been the largest use of the military inside the United States since the Civil War.

With the coronavirus pandemic raging, Stephen Miller, the architect of Mr. Trump’s immigration agenda, had urged the Homeland Security Department to develop a plan for the number of troops that would be needed to seal the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico. It is not clear whether it was officials in homeland security or the Pentagon who concluded that a quarter of a million troops would be required.

According to the Times, Esper was “enraged” by the idea, which was never formally presented to Trump but discussed in meetings at the White House, as it debated options for closing the border. Among other things, Esper believed that deploying so many active-duty troops to the border would “undermine American military readiness around the world,” which it undoubtedly would have. Esper reportedly confronted Miller about the plans before they could make their way to Trump, who presumably would have loved the idea, and tweeted something like, “YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT IS SECURING THE BORDER LIKE NO ONE EVER HAS.”

For those of you keeping up at home, Miller’s idea ranks somewhere around the one Trump came up with with to fortify the border wall with electrified spikes “that could pierce human flesh” and “a water-filled trench…stocked with snakes or alligators.” 

Malignant tumor has something to say about Colin Powell

Elsewhere!

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F.B.I. Raids Homes Linked to Russian Oligarch (NYT)

Walmart donated to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as he fought Biden Covid vaccine mandate (CNBC)

‘People Are Hoarding’: Food Shortages Are the Next Supply-Chain Crunch (Bloomberg)

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