Can the FBI plant evidence at Trump’s resort? Appellate court challenges a special master’s request for a third-party review
On the face of it, this development is troubling since it could suggest a pattern of deception that plays into a possible obstruction of justice charge. There could be evidence of obstruction of justice at Trumps resort, the FBI said on the initial search warrant.
Cannon nixed several aspects of the plan proposed by senior Judge Raymond Dearie, who was put forward by Trump for the third-party review, that would have required the former President to make uncomfortable assertions in court, including whether he actually believes the FBI planted evidence at Mar-a-Lago, as he has suggested in public statements.
Cannon made clear on Thursday that Trump will have a chance to bring additional litigation after the special master process is done and that there will be more litigation on her docket.
Trump went to court to secure an order requiring that a third attorney review the materials seized in the search. Documents marked as classified were excluded from that review by an appellate court, allowing for their use in the criminal probe.
A complicated court directed process for sorting through thousands of documents seized from Mar-a-Lago allowed Trump’s lawyers to determine if they are off limits to investigators. In the weeks since Trump left Florida, the Justice Department and intelligence community have had access to about 100 records that were marked as classified.
Cannon on Thursday rejected part of the special master’s plan that would have forced the former President’s legal team to back up his out-of-court claims that the FBI planted evidence.
“There shall be no separate requirement on Plaintiff at this stage, prior to the review of any of the Seized Materials, to lodge ex ante final objections to the accuracy of Defendant’s Inventory, its descriptions, or its contents,” Cannon wrote, noting that her order appointing a special master contemplated only the government filing a declaration verifying the accuracy of the inventory.
Cannon said Trump does not have to provide certain information about his executive privilege claims in the review.
The federal judge removed the special master’s proposed requirement that Trump, when asserting a document is covered by executive privilege, specify whether he believed that barred disclosure within the executive branch versus disclosure outside of it.
An order by the district court which restricts the Executive Branch from using their own highly classified records in ongoing criminal investigations is what Trump is asking the Supreme Court to consider.
The Digital Information Warfare Containment Problem: A Comment on the Case of Donald Trump in the National Archives of Mar-a-Lago
Cannon pointed out the issues the parties had faced in securing a vendor to digitize the seized materials for the review.
“In conversations between Plaintiff’s counsel and the Government regarding a data vendor, the Government mentioned that the 11,000 documents contain closer to 200,000 pages. The estimated volume is one of the factors that led many of the Government’s selected vendors to decline the potential engagement, according to the Trump team.
The National Archives referred the House Oversight committee to the Department of Justice because of the second question, whether former President Trump has surrendered all presidential records.
The National Archives had been trying for months to get Mr. Trump to return the presidential records that he neglected to turn over, and had become a point of contact for the lawyer Alex Cannon. Mr. Cannon refused to give Mr. Trump’s message because he was not sure if it was true, the people said.
The court could move quicker than Trump hopes even if it hears the case. Justice Clarence Thomas, for instance, on Tuesday quickly gave the Justice Department until 5 p.m. on October 11 to provide a response to Trump’s appeal.
Donald Trump requested the Supreme Court to intervene in the dispute over the documents seized from his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The special master is frustrated with how little information he is getting about the Mar-a-Lago documents.
Trump isn’t going to win: the Supreme Court will tell you what you have to do, and why you shouldn’t take it
There is no guarantee that the court, already being dragged deep into politics, will perceive this case as bearing such vital constitutional or legal importance that failing to take it up would be a dereliction of duty.
Since he needs to prove that he has suffered irreparable harm in order to get emergency relief, Trump could simply lose, even if the justices decide to take the case.
In January, the court declined to block a handover from the National Archives of 700 documents that the House select committee probing the US Capitol insurrection said that it needed for its investigation. The Supreme Court refused to hear the election challenges. The court has also ruled that the then-President was not immune from a New York subpoena in a criminal investigation seeking his tax records.
Trump has long appeared to believe that judges he appointed owe him loyalty. He nominated Neil Gorsuch, the third justice on the Supreme Court.
He usually responds badly to his defeats before the top bench. In December of 2020, he claimed that the court had let him down and that it displayed no wisdom or courage in dismissing a challenge to the election.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/politics/trump-supreme-court-mar-a-lago-documents/index.html
The Supreme Court’s Case against Donald Trump in Watergate: An Injunction against the FBI from a Search of Trump’s Florida Residence and Resort
It keeps him in the news and fuels a sense among his supporters that he is being treated unfairly. In this case, Trump often substitute a political or public relations strategy for a strong legal one. And it would be no surprise to see Trump fundraising off of his emergency request.
His latest move is in line with his habit of slowing down cases or exaggerating the case to make them look better. Stevevladeck suggested that the application to the court came across as an attempt by his team to appease a litigious client.
Good lawyers who are stuck do this to appease their bad clients, because the jurisdictional argument is narrow and technical. It’s a way of filing something in the Supreme Court without going all the way to crazytown and/or acting unethically,” Vladeck, a University of Texas law professor, wrote on Twitter.
But Trump’s team pushed back, saying in Tuesday’s filing that this position “cannot be reconciled” with the DOJ saying it may want to show those same documents to a grand jury or to witnesses during interviews.
The application argued that the case was a politically motivated investigation of the President by his rival and successor, and that they took liberties with the facts of the case.
“I didn’t see much of an emergency,” Dean, who was at the center of the Watergate scandal that brought down President Richard Nixon, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday.
“The arguments are highly technical and not the sort of thing the Supreme Court, I would think, would want to get into given their current standing in public opinion.”
The Justice officials, including Jay Bratt, a top lawyer in the Department of Justice’s national security division, have told Trump’s attorneys that he has an ongoing obligation to return the documents marked as classified.
It is unknown if the FBI rounded up all the federal records in Trump’s possession during its August 8 search of his Florida residence and resort.
Prosecutors told an appeals court that the judge’s order was preventing the FBI from taking investigative steps that could lead to identification of other records still missing.
The injunction forbids the government from using the seized records’ contents in order to locate any additional records.
The Investigating the Defendant and President of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Obstructions of Justice
But other lawyers in Mr. Trump’s circle — who have argued for taking a more adversarial posture in dealing with the Justice Department — disagreed with Mr. Kise’s approach. They talked Mr. Trump out of the idea and have encouraged him to maintain an aggressive stance toward the authorities, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The team of two searched Trump Tower in New York, the Bedminster golf club, an office location in Florida, and the storage unit where the two documents were found and where the General Services Administration had shipped Trump’s belongings after he left the White House.
Bobb spoke with investigators. The Mar-a-Lago facility and potential obstruction of justice are under investigation by the Justice Department.
Bobb stated in her affidavit that she was making the certification based upon the information provided to her.
Donald Trump’s legal team received a subpoena from the FBI for any classified documents at the Florida estate, and the former President directed a Trump employee to move boxes from a basement storage room to his residence in Mar-a-Lago.
The committee wants Trump to turn over his communications from Election Day on November 3, 2020, to the inauguration of Biden on January 20, 2021, as well as any communications he had with others during the week leading up to the election.
The prosecutors said in their opinion that government records were likely concealed and removed from the Storage Room and that attempts were made to obstruct the investigation. “This included evidence indicating that boxes formerly in the Storage Room were not returned prior to counsel’s review.”
The panel subpoenaed Trump last month and he must appear for an interview on November 14 and continue on subsequent days as necessary.
Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was in a secure location during the insurrection as she and other congressional leadership pondered the implications of the attack on the Capitol. The ex- President tried to avoid publicly admitting he was a loser in 2020, but his actions were even more heinous because he knew he had been defeated.
The probe of the investigation of the 2010 January 6, 2010 Mar-a-Lago events by the ex-president Donald Trump hasn’t been charged
The ex-president has not yet been charged in either probe and there is so far no indication that he will be. But the sense that Trump is approaching a moment of maximum legal peril is being driven both by signs of an increasingly aggressive investigation by special counsel Jack Smith and the realities of a calendar that offers limited time for any potential prosecutions before the 2024 campaign is in full swing. The final report on the January 6 committee will be unveiled next week and it may lead to criminal referrals to the Department of Justice.
While Trump has frequently defied gathering investigative storms, and ever since launching his presidential campaign in 2015 has repeatedly confounded predictions of his imminent demise, there’s a sense that he’s sliding into an ever-deeper legal hole.
The court turned down his emergency request to intervene, which could have delayed the case, without explaining why. No dissents were noted, including from conservative justices Trump elevated to the bench and whom he often seems to believe owe him a debt of loyalty.
The political drama surrounding the revelations over one of the worst days in modern American history, January 6, 2010, has nothing to do with the battle over top secret documents and everything to do with the threat of true criminal exposure that is being portrayed by the ex- President.
There were more revelations about the Justice Department investigation which could potentially cause a lot of problems for the ex-president. The DOJ has the power to bring indictments, which is a different power than that of the House.
Trump’s team has been keeping track of those who have testified before the grand jury, as well as their legal representatives, who foot the bill. Some people believe that the transcripts could give a new insight into the investigation.
Still, David Schoen, who was Trump’s defense lawyer in his second impeachment, told CNN’s “New Day” that though the details of what happened at Mar-a-Lago raised troubling questions, they did not necessarily amount to a case of obstructing justice.
The opinion of a federal judge in California that there was evidence that Trump and his allies were scheming to defraud the US government can support obstruction of an official proceeding.
The New York Attorney General asked a court to block the Trump Organization from moving assets and continuing to perpetrate what she has said is a decades-long fraud.
In an application for a preliminary injunction in her case against Donald Trump, James said that he would continue to engage in fraudulent conduct until the court ordered him to stop.
The Justice Department’s investigation into the White House documents seized from former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and resort is among the most politically explosive probes in recent years.
Now federal investigators are planning for a burst of post-election activity in Trump-related investigations. That includes the prospect of indictments of Trump’s associates – moves that could be made more complicated if Trump declares a run for the presidency.
The Unselect Committee is a Terrible Place to Probe a First-Principles Committee on Election Prediction and Subpoena Investigations, Revisited
As always, Trump came out fighting on Thursday, one of those days when the seriousness of a crisis he is facing can often be gauged by the vehemence of the rhetoric he uses to respond.
First Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich mocked the unanimous 9-0 vote in the select committee to subpoena the former President for documents and testimony.
“Pres Trump will not be intimidate(d) by their meritless rhetoric or un-American actions. Budowich said that Trump candidates will sweep the Midterms, and America First leadership and solutions will be restored.
The former President weighed in on his Truth Social network with a post that did not answer the accusations against him, but that was designed to cause a political reaction from his supporters.
“Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago? Why didn’t they meet before the final moments of their meeting? The Committee is a gross waste of time. Trump wrote.
If he does not fight the subpoena, there is a chance he will relish a prime time spot in a live hearing, as he has blocked efforts to examine his presidency.
In its initial subpoena, the committee alleges that Giuliani promoted election fraud on his behalf and sought to convince legislators to overturn the election results. The subpoena stated that Giuliani was in contact with Trump and members of the congress regarding strategies for delaying or reversing the results of the 2020 election.
If Trump doesn’t testify, any attempt to follow that path could take months and involve lengthy legal battles. It is not certain whether the Justice Department would consider this to be a good investment as it is under investigation. And there’s a good chance the committee will be swept into history anyway, with Republicans favored to take over the House majority following the midterm elections.
Given the slim chance of Trump complying with a congressional subpoena then, many observers will see the dramatic vote to target the ex-President as yet another theatrical flourish in a set of slickly produced hearings that often resembled a television courtroom drama.
The investigation was no longer just about what happened on January 6, but about the future, says Rep. Liz Cheney.
The Wyoming lawmaker said she wouldn’t return to Congress after losing her primary to a Trump-backed challenger and that there was an effort to excuse the conduct of the former President.
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals Denounces the Interlocutory Order authorizing the Special Master to review documents seized from President Donald Trump’s home
The records were considered highly sensitive and the Justice Department asked the court to stay out of the dispute.
The Department of Justice wrote earlier this week that courts should be careful when examining records that could endanger the national security of the country.
A panel of judges on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, however, acting upon a request from the Justice Department, agreed to freeze portions of those orders while the legal dispute plays out.
“The Eleventh Circuit lacked jurisdiction to review, much less stay, an interlocutory order of the District Court providing for the Special Master to review materials seized from President Trump’s home,” Trump told the Supreme Court last week.
The 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals halted the review of seized documents because Judge Raymond Dearie was the special master.
“Any limit on the comprehensive and transparent review of materials seized in the extraordinary raid of a President’s home erodes public confidence in our system,” the filing said.
While the former President’s team initially got the special master they had pushed for, an appellate court brought an abrupt end to the role. The DOJ has also appointed a special counsel – much to Trump’s chagrin.
Where is the beef? I need some beef,” Judge Raymond Dearie, acting as the third-party reviewer of the seized documents, said during a half-hour conference call with the attorneys from both sides.
Dearie’s discussion on Tuesday and previous orders set a timeline for him to make decisions on the privacy of documents by mid-December. The Justice Department is separately already working through about 100 records marked as classified that were seized at Mar-a-Lago and split out from Dearie’s work, and the agency is also challenging at a federal appeals court the special master process on the whole.
Dearie asked why the two sides can’t determine among themselves if the letter was sent, which would be a crucial fact to help the judge decide if it should be kept confidential.
“I don’t want to be dealing with nonsense objections, nonsense assertions, especially when I have one month to deal with who knows how many assertions,” said Dearie of the Eastern District of New York.
“Unless I’m wrong, and I’ve been wrong before, there’s a certain incongruity there. Dearie said that the counsel may address that in a submission.
On the Discovery of Mar-A-Lago Trump’s Personal Property and Executive Privileges: a Case Study in the Trump White House
The parties have not yet indicated how many of the nearly 22,000 pages seized at Mar-a-Lago Trump are in dispute and will require the special master to make a call.
The possibility of allowing federal officials to return to Trump’s property – likely with Trump’s own lawyers present – is just one option on the table as the Trump team grapples with how best to protect the former President from legal jeopardy. No firm decisions have been made while sources familiar with the situation say Trump’s legal team is continuing to weigh how accommodating or adversarial they should be toward the Justice Department.
The approach comes even as Trump continues to indulge legal theories that the records he took with him at the end of his presidency are his personal property, an argument his team is making in court and that he first heard from conservative judicial activist Tom Fitton.
“The general belief in Trump World is that this is much ado about nothing and the sooner we get past it the better,” said a person close to Trump, adding that the former President has told allies he “wants to move on.”
At least some of the battle to secure their return has been playing out behind the scenes in a court proceeding that is under seal, according to people familiar with the situation. The Trump team could be forced to work with DOJ to arrange another search, if the Justice Department gets a judge’s order.
Trump has made claims about federal investigators planting evidence in Mar-A-Lago, a claim that he has never substantiated in court.
Corcoran has insisted to colleagues that he does not believe he faces any legal risk and has not hired a lawyer, according to sources familiar with his situation.
A third Trump lawyer, Boris Epshteyn, had his cellphone seized by the FBI last month and has testified in front of a Georgia grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The letter, filed on Thursday by the Justice Department, describes disputes over ownership and executive privilege claims involving a batch of 15 records that have undergone early review. F.B.I. agents took a lot of documents and materials from Mar-a-Lago, the club and residence of Donald Trump.
The materials from the initial tranche that Mr. Trump maintains belong to him include six packages submitted to him when he was president supporting requests that he grant clemency to pardon-seekers; two documents related to his administration’s immigration policies; and an email addressed to him from a person at a military academy, it said.
The rule of law and free elections are under attack by Donald Trump and his movement as they pose new challenges to accountability.
Trump dropped his clearest hint yet Saturday of a new White House run at a moment when he’s on a new collision course with the Biden administration, the courts and facts.
After losing reelection in 2020, Trump was back in the center of US politics but there were a lot of confrontations. It’s likely to make the nation even more divided. The 2020 elections and the first few months of the presidential campaign will be troubled by Trump’s chaotic style.
Those controversies also show that given the open legal and political loops involving the ex-President, a potential 2024 presidential campaign rooted in his claims of political persecution could create even more upheaval than his four years in office.
And while fierce differences are emerging between Democrats and Republicans over policy on the economy, abortion, foreign policy and crime in the 2022 midterms – while concerns about democracy often rank lower for voters – there is every chance the coming political period revolves mostly around the ex-President’s past and future.
In the weeks leading up to the election, the Justice Department has observed the traditional quiet period of not making any overt moves that may have political consequences. The investigation into the attempted overturn of the election and the alleged mismanagement of the national security documents kept at Trump’s Palm Beach home has remained busy despite aggressive grand jury subpoenas and secret court battles.
Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the Trump Organization, and the Ex-President Kristin Lake: Are Pro-Trump Candidates Unfairly Treatment?
In Arizona, one of the ex-President’s favorite candidates, GOP gubernatorial hopeful Kari Lake – a serial spreader of voter fraud falsehoods – is again raising doubts about the election system. Lake told AZ TV7 on Sunday that he was afraid that it was not going to be fair.
One of the most powerful pro-Trump Republicans, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the party’s number three leader in the House, told the New York Post last week that impeachment of Biden was “on the table.” Nancy Mace told CNN she did not want to see an impeachment trial after Trump was impeached twice. She said she was against the process being “weaponized.” But when asked whether Biden had committed impeachable offenses, she said: “That is something that would have to be investigated.”
The Republican party is likely to expand its presence in Washington after the elections. Scores of Trump-endorsed candidates are running on a platform of his 2020 election fraud falsehoods, raising questions over whether they will accept results should they lose their races in just over two weeks.
The Trump Organization will be going on trial in New York on Monday. The trial of the ex- President may affect his business empire and cause him more to say that he is being unfairly treated for political reasons. The New York Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Donald Trump and the Trump Organization as well as three of his adult children for running tax and insurance fraud schemes to enrich themselves for years.
Democrats have made their own attempts to return Trump to the political spotlight. President Joe Biden equated MAGA followers with “semi-fascism” and some campaigns have tried to scare critical suburban voters by warning pro-Trump candidates are a danger to democracy.
Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/24/politics/donald-trump-circus-analysis/index.html
Evidence in favor of a Special Counsel in the Investigating the Dereliction of Duty by the Ex-President Donald J. Cheney
The party in power in Washington may be put out of business if voters worry about inflation and gasoline prices before they head to the polls.
The ex- President told a crowd at a Texas rally that he would probably have to run in the White House again.
It could take a number of days, but Cheney said it would be done with a level of rigor and seriousness that it deserved.
The first debate with Joe Biden is not going to be his first debate, so that is what this will be. This is an issue that is too serious.
Most of the time the committee has taken depositions in private and used testimony during highly produced presentations. Only its most sympathetic witnesses have appeared in person. While this has helped create a powerful narrative that has painted a picture of shocking derelictions of duty by Trump on January 6, it has also deprived viewers of seeing witnesses under cross examination. It’s difficult to know if the committee’s case will stand the test of a court of law.
The prospect of video testimony over an intense period of days or hours is likely to be unappealing to the former President because it would be harder for him to dictate the terms of the exchanges and control how his testimony might be used.
Trump has already tried to use claims that justice is being weaponized against him as rocket fuel for his 2024 presidential bid. And while the law, and not politics, is Garland’s stated business, any potential prosecution of Trump must balance the national interest and the precedent that would be set if a commander in chief were to get away with attempting to overthrow an election.
Indicting an active candidate for the White House would surely spark a political firestorm. And while no decision has been made about whether a special counsel might be needed in the future, DOJ officials have debated whether doing so could insulate the Justice Department from accusations that Joe Biden’s administration is targeting his chief political rival, people familiar with the matter tell CNN.
Sources told CNN that a grand jury subpoena had been given to the lawyer, who had communications regarding the handling of Trump records.
The judge of the District Court granted immunity from prosecution to Patel for any information that he provided to the investigation, the people said.
The decision of the court is under seal after a confidential proceeding in which the Justice Department subpoenaed Jai Kishan to testify to the jury. At that time, he declined to answer questions by asserting his Fifth Amendment protection from self-incrimination.
According to court records and sources, a few of President Trump’s advisers may have legal risk related to the Mar-a-Lago situation, but it is not clear if he is among them.
He served as a national security and defense official during the Trump administration, and this summer became one of Trump’s designees to interact with the National Archives and the Justice Department as both agencies have tried to repossess classified records. He claimed in media interviews that he witnessed Trump declassifying records before he left the presidency, and that he thought Trump should be able to release classified information.
The Mueller investigation, Raskin and Rody: a former prosecutor and attorney general counsel to investigate Mar-a-Lago, the FBI’s Russia probe, and the prospects for 2020 presidential elections
Other witnesses were subpoenaed to the grand jury looking at Mar-a-Lago over the past several months, including in a flurry of activity around the day of the FBI’s August search, one source said.
The prospect of a special counsel was worrying the lawyers, because they were worried that it could take too long to wrap up the investigation. And Trump himself has complained about the matter, likening the prospect to former special counsel Robert Mueller, who oversaw the Russia investigation.
It likely won’t take long after the midterms for focus to shift to the 2024 presidential race. That could incentivize top DOJ officials to make crucial charging decisions as quickly as possible, including whether to bring charges against Trump himself or other top political activists, other sources familiar with the Justice Department’s inner workings say.
“They can crank up charges on almost anybody if they wanted to,” said one defense attorney working on January 6-related matters, who added defense lawyers have “have no idea” who ultimately will be charged.
Special counsels, of course, are hardly immune from political attacks. Both former special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation and special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Russia probe came under withering criticism from their opponents.
Top Justice officials looked at an old guard of former Southern District of New York prosecutors, brought into the investigations Kansas City-based federal prosecutor and national security expert David Raskin and David Rody, a prosecutor turneddefense lawyer who previously specialized in gang and conspiracy cases.
Sources familiar with the situation say, that Rody left Sidley Austin to become a senior counsel in the DOJ’s criminal division in Washington, and left a lucrative partnership in the firm to do it.
The DC US Attorney’s Office Investigating the January 6 Elections: Investigations of Right-Wing Extremists and the Biden/Gaetz Case
The team at the DC US Attorney’s Office handling the day-to-day work of the January 6 investigations is also growing – even while the office’s sedition cases against right-wing extremists go to trial.
A handful of other prosecutors have joined the January 6 investigations team, including a high-ranking fraud and public corruption prosecutor who has moved out of a supervisor position and onto the team, and a prosecutor with years of experience in criminal appellate work now involved in some of the grand jury activity.
Attorney General Garland said that the case would depend on whether the facts and evidence support a prosecution. Garland will make the decisions about charging.
Garland dodged a CNN question on the matter in March but he said that the Justice Department won’t shy away from controversial or political cases.
Garland said that they would avoid any partisan elements of the decision making about the cases. That is what I aim to ensure that the Department decisions are made on the merits and that they are not based on any kind of partisan considerations.
Garland’s tough decisions go beyond Trump. People briefed on the matter say that the investigation of Hunter Biden, the son of the president is nearing an end. Also waiting in the wings: a final decision on the investigation of Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz, after prosecutors recommended against charges.
A former Justice Department official said that the investigations will not charge until they are ready to charge. The DOJ has a typical five-year window to bring charges but there will be added pressure to get through the review of cases earlier.
Willis has observed her own version of a quiet period around the midterm election and is seeking to bring witnesses before the grand jury in the coming weeks. CNN indictments are said to come as early as December.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham is one of the witnesses that tried to fight off subpoenas as part of the state probe into efforts to interfere with the Georgia 2020 election.
How those disputes resolve in Georgia – including whether courts force testimony – could improve DOJ’s ability to gather information, just as the House Select Committee’s January 6 investigation added to DOJ’s investigative leads from inside the Trump White House.
Trump has also foiled the DOJ’s efforts to keep things quiet in the weeks leading up to the election, leading to a steady barrage of headlines related to the investigation.
A source with knowledge of the Justice Department’s approach says that the outcome of the intelligence review will determine if criminal charges will be filed.
The select committee began sending documents and transcripts as of last week, the source added, with the production focusing specifically on former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump’s former election lawyer John Eastman.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the vice chairwoman of the committee, previously said the committee was “in discussions” with Trump’s attorneys about testifying under oath in the probe. It’s not certain whether those talks will lead to a deposition.
All documents and communications that reference members of the Oath Keepers, the Proud Boys, or other extremist groups from September 1, 2020, to the present were requested in the broad document request. The 19 different categories comprise the panel’s document request.
Two documents with classified markings were found in a Florida storage unit during a search by a team hired by former President Donald Trump’s lawyers, a person familiar with the situation told CNN.
The four searches came amid lingering concerns from the Justice Department that not all documents had been returned to the federal government. CNN has been told that the searches were overseen by Trump’s legal team.
The House Select Committee on Capitol Attack, which was formed to investigate the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, will hold its last public meeting on Monday, ending an investigation that spanned 17 months and included more than 1,000 interviews.
The committee has not officially decided whom to refer to the Justice Department for prosecution and for what offenses, sources said. The four people who are under consideration have not been reported in the past so they can provide a bit of perspective on the deliberations.
A referral represents a recommendation that the Justice Department investigate and look at charging the individuals in question. The House committee’s final report – to be released Wednesday – will provide justification from the panel’s investigation for recommending the charges.
Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat who chaired the panel, told reporters that members started to think of issuing criminal referrals as the investigation continued.
“I think the more we looked at the body of evidence that we had collected, we just felt that while we’re not in the business of investigating people for criminal activities, we just couldn’t overlook some of them,” Thompson said.
A leader of a subcommittee tasked with presenting recommendations on criminal referrals to the full committee said Thursday that anyone who engages in criminal actions needs to be held accountable. And we are going to spell that out.”
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who leads the January 6 subcommittee tasked with presenting recommendations on criminal referrals to the full panel, recently said that “the gravest offense in constitutional terms is the attempt to overthrow a presidential election and bypass the constitutional order. The scale and gravity of that violent assault on America is supported by a whole host of statutory offenses.
The subcommittee tasked with giving recommendation to the full panel was comprised of the three Democrats along with the GOP representative from Wyoming.
The production focusing on the former White House Chief of staff MarkMeadows and the election lawyer for Trump is what has been sending documents and transcripts to the committee.
Special Counsel to the Committee on Investigating the Corrupt Practices of Donald J. Clark in the Post-Trump Era and the Mueller Investigation
Raskin also suggested Thursday that previous referrals to DOJ for contempt of Congress would not impact how the panel handles these criminal referrals.
“We obviously did contempt of Congress referrals earlier and there’s a whole statutory process for making that happen,” he said. In order to make certain kinds of referrals for certain people and others, we have to explain our decisions in detail.
The opinion was handed down by the US District Judge, David O. Carter. He was in a dispute over whether the House could see certain emails. The judge cited emails discussing Trump’s awareness that certain voter fraud claims being made in court were inaccurate as evidence of a plot to defraud the federal government.
The committee walked through how the idea of Pence blocking the election was rejected by the White House and Trump, but embraced by the former President, despite the fact that other people were against it.
Clark invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times during his deposition with the committee. Federal investigators searched Clark’s home.
The June hearing was devoted to the role Clark played in the Trump campaign to subvert the Justice Department in the final months of his term, in order to stay in power.
The committee zeroed in on the efforts of Rep. Scott Perry, the Pennsylvania Republican, who helped Clark get into the White House.
CNN has previously reported on the role that Perry played, and the committee in court filings released text messages Perry exchanged with Meadows about Clark.
Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Meadows, said at the hearing that he wanted Mr. Jeff Clark to take over the Department of Justice.
In May, Giuliani met with the committee for more than nine hours, while he was still trying to overturn the 2020 election results.
A special counsel is a lawyer who can investigate and prosecute anyone suspected of crimes. He or she must come from outside the government. A special counsel is typically appointed when the usual investigative bodies under the Justice Department, such as the FBI, have a conflict of interest in carrying out a probe.
In light of recent developments, including the former president announcing that he is a candidate for president in the next election, I have concluded that it is in the public interest to appoint a special counsel, according to Garland.
Jack Smith worked in the special court in The Netherlands where he investigated war crimes in Kosovo.
The Failure of Law and Order: The Case against the Giant Boss and the Misleading Claims of the Ex-President of the House Intelligence Committee
At the America First event at Mar-a-Lago on Friday night, the former president spoke about the appointment of the special counsel and the abuse of power.
The former president said that before the announcement from Garland, he had believed federal investigations into him were over. He repeatedly called the investigations political and said it was not a fair situation and would not be a fair investigation, telling the crowd at Mar-a-Lago, “You’d really say enough is enough.”
The appeals court said the law was clear. “We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. We cannot write a rule that makes it possible for only one former president to do so.
The 11th Circuit said that either approach would be a “radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations” and that “both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations.”
Prosecutors are examining whether there was obstruction of justice, criminal handling of government records and violations of the Espionage Act, which prohibits unauthorized storage of national defense information.
The signs of slow burning efforts to get through the trauma of the post election period bring a warning that the future threat to truth and democracy remains acute. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a key force in the new House majority that is likely to attempt to shut down or obstruction of investigations intoTrump, is involved in yet another controversy over insurrection.
The Georgia Republican said that if she had her way, the mob that smashed into the Capitol would have been armed. She then rebuffed White House condemnations of her comments by insisting she was joking. This came days after the ex-president stepped up his voter fraud falsehoods by demanding the termination of the Constitution in a sign of how his potential second term might unfold if he wins the 2024 election and returns to the White House.
It is remarkable how much tighter the hold on Washington politics is because of Trump’s attempts to overturn a presidential election. And Trump’s campaign of lies is having a damaging impact. Even after Republicans won the House last month, a new CNN/SSRS poll published Monday found that only 34% of Republican-aligned adults are even somewhat confident that elections reflect the will of the people – down from 43% in October.
CNN is reporting that Smith is speeding up the probes into Trump’s role in the attempt to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 and his careless storage of classified documents. It emerged Monday that Smith’s team subpoenaed Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was on the other end of the then-president’s phone call designed to convince him to “find” sufficient votes to overturn Joe Biden’s win in the Peach State in 2020. Smith has also issued a flurry of grand jury subpoenas since Thanksgiving, including to ex-Trump adviser Stephen Miller and two former White legal counsels.
“It’s been over 700 days since the Washington Post published the full hour audio … of that highly incriminating phone call – 700 days for the DOJ to finally get around to subpoena him. When does it happen? Under Jack Smith.”
Goodman also suggested that Trump’s legal team was guilty of wishful thinking if they believed that Smith’s appointment after a period spent abroad meant he was less likely to be influenced by the politicized aftermath of the January 6 attack and that a fresh mind would lean against indictments.
The former US attorney for the Southern District of New York said on NBC that his appointment and the assembling of a high-powered team of experienced prosecutors were bad news for Trump.
They would not have left their former positions if there was a chance the Justice Department would charge them. And I think it’ll happen in a month,” he said.
Of the two investigations, legal experts say the one regarding classified documents may move ahead the fastest after several failed attempts by Trump in court to delay it. A judge dismissed a case that challenged the Mar-a-Lago evidence collection on Monday. The Justice Department has full access to tens of thousands of records that were found in Trump’s private office and beach club.
Attorney General Garland vowed that no one is above the law and that investigations will go where evidence leads. But the reality of the legal process means that any trials would take considerable time to prepare and conduct. It would be ideal for any proceedings to take place well before the end of the White House race, if there is a prosecution of a former president.
According to CNN legal analyst, Jennifer Rodgers, it is now a challenge to finish the cases in time for the election.
“So, I think they will bring a case on the documents side, if they can, as soon as they can,” Rodgers said, adding that any case on January 6 would probably take more time.
While Smith is following legal procedures, the political context makes it even more incumbent on the DOJ to demonstrate to Americans that it had no choice, for instance, to mount an unprecedented search at an ex-president’s home.
That’s yet another reason why the turn of the year and the early months of 2023 are beginning to look like a moment of reckoning for both Trump and those who are investigating him.
The final committee report could include additional charges proposed for Trump, according to the source. It will show justification for the committee to recommend the charges.
In the summary of its report released earlier this week, the panel revealed it is aware of “multiple efforts by President Trump to contact Select Committee witnesses,” adding that DOJ is aware “of at least one of those circumstances.”
A spokesman for Donald Trump said in a statement that the committee was a “kangaroo court” that had “show trials by Never Trump partisans, who are a stain on this country’s history.”
“We have been very careful in crafting these recommendations and tethering them to the facts that we have uncovered.” said Rep. Lofgren, a member of the committee.
We spent a lot of time with the facts, but it was really important that the people understand what we were talking about when we voted on it.
The 2020 Capitol Insurrection Action Committee’s Task Force on the Capitol Controversy: Expectations and Predictions for Monday’s Meeting
But the Justice Department has not opted to bring the charge in its hundreds of US Capitol riot cases. Instead, prosecutors have relied on criminal statutes related to violence, obstruction of an official proceeding, and, in some limited cases, seditious conspiracy.
The full report of the investigation could be made public on Monday. The appendices and transcripts from the more than 1,000 witnesses could be made public on Wednesday.
After nearly two years, a meeting is scheduled on Monday to finish the investigation into the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol in January of 2021.
Thompson told reporters last week that they could issue more than one category of referrals – including ethics referrals to the House Ethics Committee and bar discipline referrals.
We will not know everything coming out of the January 6 committee until this week, so here is what you need to know about what is expected, what is not, and where this could lead.
The public meeting is scheduled for Monday, and the panel is expected to refer at least three criminal charges against Trump to the Justice Department.
But whether the department brings charges will depend on whether the facts and the evidence support a prosecution, Garland, who will make the ultimate call on charging decisions, has said.
Judges have used the term “insurrection” to describe the January 6 attack on Congress’ certification of the 2020 presidential election. But the Justice Department has not opted to bring the charge in its hundreds of US Capitol riot cases.
The Select Committee on Investigating Senate Subpoena Violation: Rep. Adam Schiff, R-Calif., Jan. 6, 2018
Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, a member of the select committee, said Sunday that the panel is considering how to hold accountable GOP lawmakers who defied their subpoenas.
“We will also be considering what’s the appropriate remedy for members of Congress who ignore a congressional subpoena, as well as the evidence that was so pertinent to our investigation and why we wanted to bring them in,” the California Democrat told CNN’s Jake Tapper on “State of the Union.”
“That will be something we will be considering tomorrow,” Schiff added, noting that the panel has weighed whether it is better to criminally refer members of Congress to other parts of the federal government or if Congress should “police its own.”
The committee also referred four Republican House members — Kevin McCarthy of California, Jim Jordan of Ohio, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Andy Biggs of Arizona — to the House Ethics Committee for failure to comply with subpoenas.
A January 6 panel’s move to approve a referral is symbolic because it does not obligate federal prosecutors to bring such a case.
Among them are insurrection, obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the federal government, according to a source familiar with the matter.
For the latter two, the lawmakers can rely on an opinion from a federal judge in California, who wrote earlier this year that there was evidence that Trump and his allies were plotting to defraud the US government and to obstruct an official proceeding. The opinion was handed down by US District Judge David O. Carter in a dispute over whether the House could access certain emails sent to and from former Trump attorney John Eastman.
Through blockbuster hearings, interviews with some of the former president’s closest allies and court battles to free up documents, the committee sought to tell the definitive narrative of what happened in the lead up to and on January 6.
He said that individuals will not be named to more than one category, if any referrals are presented on Monday. The public presentation is part of the meeting on Monday.
Why Does This Happen? Investigating “Trump’s” Campaign to Overturn the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’s “Flavor”
GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of two Republicans on the committee who will be retiring at the end of this Congress, told CNN, “It would be nice if the last thing I was doing was something a little less dramatic,” but he emphasized that the report will “be one of the most important things we do.”
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, has told CNN the panel is expecting to release “hundreds” of transcripts, but there are some witnesses with sensitive material that the panel has agreed to protect.
“[Trump] tried to take away the voice of the American people in choosing their president and replace the will of the voters with his will to remain in power,” Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in an October hearing. “He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on Jan. 6.”
Why does this matter?: The investigation concluded after the attack on Jan. 6. The committee is also expected to provide its assessment of some of the weaknesses in the electoral system, which members argued enabled Trump and his allies to go as far as they did in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The panel will make policy recommendations aimed at better protecting democratic institutions and processes, including reforming the Electoral Count Act.
The select committee will be dissolved at the end of the current congress. Several members of the panel will not return to the House in 2023. They are: Republican Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Democratic Reps. Elaine Luria of Virginia and Stephanie Murphy of Florida.
The full report will be eight chapters long, and will include more evidence along with descriptions of the scheme that Trump and his allies pushed to overturn the election. It will also have citations from the more than 1,000 interviews the committee members conducted over the course of their 18-month investigation.
Rep. Elaine Luria told NPR she was shocked by the plan to create a big lie and use every lever of government to corrupt an election.
Luria said that the masterminds of this were not held accountable but for trying to corrupt the government and its processes.
“We’re not going to put on new prosecutions” said Rep. Jamie Raskin. We want to make sure that all the crimes of the most serious gravity are attended to and that nothing falls through the cracks.
The Ethics Committee, a panel to investigate the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the evidence against two fake Trump ally’s
Additionally, the committee has also laid out evidence against those who they say crafted and pushed the strategy of derailing the certification of the election:
Goldman said the panel could have evidence that the Justice Department wouldn’t have with a referral. The panel could be considering referrals for witness intimidation, obstruction of justice and false statements made under oath, Goldman suggested.
Goldman said that the Department of Justice wants to make sure that they evaluate all the evidence that they have uncovered, to be sure that the charges should be brought.
NPR has obtained a small portion of a draft script for the Monday meeting that shows the panel intends to accuse John and Kenneth of being involved in the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
The effort to overturn Biden’s win was led by an ally of Trump who is also known as a key figure in the scheme to get a bunch of fake Trump electors in states that voted for Biden.
“They could be subject of both criminal referrals, but also referrals to their state bar association to review whether or not they should continue to have their bar license if they are making blatant misrepresentations in court filings or otherwise,” Goldman said.
The ethics committee’s referrals of House members to the ethics committee are uncertain, as they’re likely to hit a wall if Republicans take control of the House in the new year.
McCarthy was asked at the press conference if he was concerned about his and his colleagues facing criminal referrals. We did not do anything wrong.
CNN’s Special Report on the Investigating of the Insurrection in the U.S. Senate. J.T. Smith, D.C. Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the Senate Select Committee on Investigations of
So far, more than 900 people have been charged with crimes related to the attack. In all but one of the 50 states law enforcement has arrested people for rioting.
CNN’s special coverage of the meeting, anchored by Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett, will begin at 12 p.m. ET. It will stream live from 12 pm to 5 pm and do not require cable log-in.
One source tells CNN that Jack Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee parts of the Department of Justice’s investigation into the insurrection, sent a letter to the committee requesting all of the data from the investigation.
The handover comes during a key week for the committee. The panel held its final public meeting on Monday, and members voted to refer the former president to the DOJ on at least four criminal charges. The panel is slated to release its full final report on Wednesday.
The panel has also started to share transcripts of witness interviews pertaining to the false slates of electors and the pressure campaign by Trump and his allies on certain states to overturn the 2020 election results.
California Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a member of the committee, said on CNN on Monday, “We’ve actually given some transcripts to the Department of Justice during the last month,” adding that the committee would begin making transcripts public on Wednesday.
The DOJ will get to look at what the panel has in the final report, which is important for their criminal probes into January 6, moreso than the criminal referrals the select committee made.
The committee presented an overview of its findings on Monday, including evidence for a number of criminal statutes it believes were violated in the plots to stave off former President Donald Trump’s defeat.
“The Select Committee also has concerns regarding certain other witnesses, including those who still rely for their income or employment by organizations linked to President Trump, such as the America First Policy Institute,” the panel wrote in Monday’s summary.
There were witnesses who were unnecessarily combative, answered hundreds of questions with variations of “I don’t recall”, testified from lawyer-written talking points rather than their own recollections, and otherwise didn’t tell the truth.
The public can make their own assessment of these issues when they compare accounts of different witnesses and counsel, according to a summary.
The committee wrote that it had serious doubts about the testimony, and would release his transcript publicly. Ornato didn’t remember telling Hutchinson or a White House employee about the information, according to the report. The Committee is not sure about Ornato’s account.
The 2020 Capitol Attack Investigated with the DOJ Investigating a Democratic Minority-Member Referees Subpoenae
In terms of financing after the 2020 presidential election, the committee says it has gathered evidence that shows Trump raised roughly one quarter of a billion dollars in fundraising during the months after the election.
The Republican National Committee and the Trump Campaign sent millions of emails to their supporters, saying that the election was rigged in favor of the Democrats, and that donations could keep them from stealing the election.
Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, has said the panel has evidence that members of the Trump family and inner circle – including Kimberly Guilfoyle – personally benefited from money that was raised based on the former president’s false election claims, but the panel has never gone as far to say a financial crime has been committed.
DOJ initially asked the panel for all of its transcripts back in May, but committee members, particularly Thompson, felt strongly the depositions were the property of the committee.
Advisers and aides to the former president are hoping that the release of the panel’s transcript will provide new information about the DOJ criminal investigation.
Various Republican lawmakers have sought to discredit the select committee’s work since its inception and have argued that the panel has not addressed the security failures that led to the US Capitol breach. Kevin McCarthy was one of five House Republicans subpoenaed by the committee. The panel took the unprecedented step of referring the four returning members of Congress to the House Ethics Committee.
McCarthy has vowed to hold hearings next year on the security failures that led to the Capitol breach and has called on the select committee to preserve all of its records and transcripts.
A full report on the attack on the U.S. Capitol that killed five people is set to be released Thursday.
In a statement released Monday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., praised the committee’s work, but did not outline what she sees as the next steps for the referrals of the four House members.
I am respectful of the conclusions that the Committee has reached, and it has developed important evidence. No one is above the law, that’s what our forefathers made clear in the Declaration of Independence. This bedrock principle remains unequivocally true, and justice must be done,” Pelosi said.
Tim Parlatore, the bipartisan select committee that has been investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, is frustrated by the referral to the Justice Department
A bill updating the Electoral Count Act has bipartisan backing and has been attached to the omnibus spending bill moving through Congress in the coming days.
The referral is worthless, Trump lawyer Tim Parlatore said on CNN. “The Department of Justice doesn’t have to follow it. There’s been an existing investigation that we have been dealing with for quite some time. Really what this does, If anything, it just politicizes the process.”
The bipartisan select committee that was investigating the January 6, 2016 attack on the US Capitol sent criminal referrals to the Justice Department earlier this week. Members of the Committee said they believed that Trump had committed at least four federal crimes.
“It’s political noise, but it doesn’t have any effect, as of right now, on our defense,” said Parlatore, who represents Trump in the Justice Department probes into January 6 and the potential mishandling of government documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Parlatore told CNN on Saturday that he was sure there weren’t any more records with classification markings still at Mar-a-Lago, saying, “Everything that was found has been turned over.”