FILE - In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo with the White House in the background, President Donald Trump speaks at a rally in Washington. The Biden administration will have a big say in whether the government releases information to Congress on the actions of former president Donald Trump and his aides on Jan. 6. But there could be a lengthy court battle before any details come out. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
“WASHINGTON (AP) — A House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has issued its first subpoenas, demanding records and testimony from four of former President Donald Trump’s close advisers and associates who were in contact with him before and during the attack.
In a significant escalation for the panel, Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., announced the subpoenas of former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Communications Dan Scavino, former Defense Department official Kashyap Patel and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. The four men are among Trump’s most loyal aides.
Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., wrote to the four that the committee is investigating ‘the facts, circumstances, and causes’ of the attack and asked them to produce documents and appear at depositions in mid-October.
The panel, formed over the summer, is now launching the interview phase of its investigation after sorting through thousands of pages of documents it had requested in August from federal agencies and social media companies. The committee has also requested a trove of records from the White House. The goal is to provide a complete accounting of what went wrong when the Trump loyalists brutally beat police, broke through windows and doors and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory — and to prevent anything like it from ever happening again.
Thompson says in letters to each of the witnesses that investigators believe they have relevant information about the lead-up to the insurrection. In the case of Bannon, for instance, Democrats cite his Jan. 5 prediction that ‘(a)ll hell is going to break loose tomorrow ‘and his communications with Trump one week before the riot in which he urged the president to focus his attention on Jan. 6.
In the letter to Meadows, Thompson cites his efforts to overturn Trump’s defeat in the weeks prior to the insurrection and his pressure on state officials to push the former president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.
Y’ou were the president’s chief of staff and have critical information regarding many elements of our inquiry,’ Thompson wrote. ‘It appears you were with or in the vicinity of President Trump on January 6, had communication with the president and others on January 6 regarding events at the Capitol and are a witness regarding the activities of the day.’
Thompson wrote that the panel has ‘credible evidence’ of Meadows’ involvement in events within the scope of the committee’s investigation. That also includes involvement in the ‘planning and preparation of efforts to contest the presidential election and delay the counting of electoral votes.’
The letter also signals that the committee is interested in Meadows’ requests to Justice Department officials for investigations into potential election fraud. Former Attorney General William Barr has said the Justice Department did not find fraud that could have affected the election’s outcome.
The panel cites reports that Patel, a Trump loyalist who had recently been placed at the Pentagon, was talking to Meadows ‘nonstop’ the day the attack unfolded. In the letter to Patel, Thompson wrote that based on documents obtained by the committee, there is ‘substantial reason to believe that you have additional documents and information relevant to understanding the role played by the Defense Department and the White House in preparing for and responding to the attack on the U.S. Capitol.’
Scavino was with Trump on Jan. 5 during a discussion about how to persuade members of Congress not to certify the election for Joe Biden, according to reports cited by the committee. On Twitter, he promoted Trump’s rally ahead of the attack and encouraged supporters to ‘be a part of history.’ In the letter to Scavino, Thompson said the panel’s records indicate that Scavino was tweeting ‘messages from the White House’ on Jan. 6.
Thompson wrote that it appears Scavino was with Trump on Jan. 6 and may have ‘materials relevant to his videotaping and tweeting’ messages that day. He noted Scavino’s ‘long service’ to the former president, spanning more than a decade.
The subpoenas are certain to anger Republicans, most of whom have been content to move on from the insurrection and have remained loyal to Trump even after denouncing the attack. Only two Republicans sit on the panel, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger.
In July, the committee held an emotional first hearing with four police officers who battled the insurrectionists and were injured and verbally abused as the rioters broke into the building and repeated Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud.
At least nine people who were there died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot and killed by police as she tried to break into the House chamber and three other Trump supporters who suffered medical emergencies. Two police officers died by suicide in the days that immediately followed, and a third officer, Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, collapsed and died after engaging with the protesters. A medical examiner later determined he died of natural causes.
The Metropolitan Police announced this summer that two more of their officers who had responded to the insurrection, Officers Kyle DeFreytag and Gunther Hashida, had also died by suicide.” Read more at AP News
“The US special envoy for Haiti has quit his job in a blistering resignation letter saying he could not be associated with the Biden administration’s decision to deport thousands of Haitian migrants to their home country, a move he called ‘inhumane’ given the deteriorating security situation in the country.
‘Our policy approach to Haiti remains deeply flawed, and my recommendations have been ignored and dismissed,’ Daniel Foote said in the letter addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Wednesday.
‘I will not be associated with the United States inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti, a country where American officials are confined to secure compounds because of the dangers posed by armed gangs in control of daily life,’ he said.
Foote was named special envoy in July just weeks after the assassination of Haiti’s president plunged the country into political turmoil.
The Western Hemisphere’s poorest country has been grappling with an array of crises including the proliferation of powerful armed gangs, food insecurity, the spread of the coronavirus, and the aftermath of a deadly earthquake in August.” Read more at Boston Globe
“The CIA has removed its top officer in Vienna following criticism of his management, including what some considered an insufficient response to a growing number of mysterious health incidents at the U.S. Embassy there, according to current and former U.S. officials.
The sidelining of the station chief in one of the largest and most prestigious CIA posts is expected to send a message that top agency leaders must take seriously any reports of ‘Havana Syndrome,’ the phenomenon named after the Cuban capital where U.S. diplomats and intelligence officers had first reported unusual and varied symptoms, from headaches to vision problems and dizziness to brain injuries, that started in 2016.
In recent months, the Austrian capital has become a hotbed of what the CIA officially calls ‘anomalous health incidents.’ The ouster of the CIA station chief comes as the State Department’s top official overseeing Havana Syndrome cases leaves her position after six months.
The department said Ambassador Pamela Spratlen was exiting because she had ‘reached the threshold of hours of labor’ permitted under her status as a retiree. But she faced calls for her resignation after a teleconference with victims who had asked a question about an FBI study that determined the illnesses had a psychological origin rather than a physical one.
Spratlen declined to say if she believed the FBI study was accurate or not, angering victims who believe their symptoms are the result of an attack, possibly with microwaves or some form of directed energy. NBC News first reported the exchange. The FBI declined to comment.
Dozens of U.S. personnel in Vienna, including diplomats and intelligence officials, as well as some of the children of U.S. employees, have reported symptoms, according to the current and former officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter.” Read more at Washington Post
“Covid-19 vaccine boosters can officially begin for certain groups of adults after the CDC approved the decision. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky recommended boosters for people ages 65 and older, residents of long-term care facilities, certain people with underlying medical conditions, and people ages 18 to 64 who are at increased risk of Covid-19 because of their workplaces or institutional settings. That last group was actually not included in the recommendations of the CDC’s vaccine advisers, but the CDC leader included them in the final approval, in line with FDA recommendations.” Read more at CNN
“The Senate is set to vote Monday on a motion to advance a temporary government funding bill that includes a suspension of the debt ceiling. Republicans are still planning to block the bill because of the debt ceiling provision, which they oppose. If they do and the bill fails, Democrats have two options to address the possible shutdown looming at the end of the month: They could remove the debt ceiling provision from the bill and pass it with GOP support, or they could just let the government go unfunded and blame their colleagues across the aisle. A reminder of the timeline here: Government funding runs out at midnight on September 30. The government will reach its borrowing limit in mid-October, which could trigger a first-ever US default.” Read more at CNN
“WASHINGTON — Congressional deal-making has been a hallmark of President Biden’s nearly five-decade political career, a skill he demonstrated just last month in helping shepherd a $1 trillion infrastructure bill through the evenly divided Senate.
But that rare bipartisan achievement and the rest of his ambitious, multitrillion-dollar domestic agenda hang in the balance this week because of a standoff between progressive and moderate Democrats. Now Biden must try to pull off an even more difficult feat of legislative magic at the weakest point of his young presidency, as he wrestles with the fallout from foreign policy crises and the renewed COVID surge that has caused his approval rating to sink.
With the clock ticking toward a Monday showdown in the House, Biden this week jumped directly into what his press secretary called the ‘messy sausage-making process.’ He summoned lawmakers to the White House Wednesday for three sit-downs, making sure to meet with warring progressives and moderates separately at this point in the delicate negotiations over passage of the infrastructure legislation and a sweeping bill that would spend up to $3.5 trillion over a decade to expand the social safety net and address climate change.” Read more at Boston Globe
Workers hired by a private firm prepare to examine Maricopa County’s ballots on May 3 in Phoenix. (Courtney Pedroza/For The Washington Post)
“A Republican-commissioned review of nearly 2.1 million ballots cast last year in Arizona confirmed the accuracy of the official results and President Biden’s win in Maricopa County, according to a draft report prepared by private contractors who conducted the recount.
The draft was obtained by The Washington Post late Thursday night in advance of a planned public release of a final version on Friday.
The ultimate findings will cap a costly and drawn-out recount launched by the GOP-led Arizona Senate that had been championed by former president Donald Trump and kept alive false claims that fraud tainted the election in the state’s most populous county. The process was pilloried by election experts who warned that the methods used by the firm hired to run the review were sloppy and biased.
After nearly six months and almost $6 million — most of it given by groups that cast doubt on the election results — the draft report shows that the review concluded that 45,469 more ballots were cast for Biden in Maricopa County than for Trump, widening Biden’s margin by 360 more votes than certified results.” Read more at Washington Post
“Under pressure from Trump, Texas announced an audit of the 2020 election in four counties. A Republican-ordered review in Arizona’s biggest county slightly widened Biden’s margin of victory.” Read more at New York Times
“White House officials prioritized President Donald Trump’s attempt to challenge the election over the pandemic response last winter, according to emails obtained by the House select subcommittee probing the government’s coronavirus response and shared with The Washington Post.
Steven Hatfill, a virologist who advised White House trade director Peter Navarro andsaid he was intimately involved in the pandemic response, repeatedly described in the emails how ‘election stuff’ took precedence over coronavirus, even as the outbreak surged to more than 250,000 new coronavirus cases per day in January.” Read more at Washington Post
“At least one person was killed and 14 others injured in a shooting yesterday at a Kroger in Collierville, Tennessee, near Memphis. The shooter was also found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, police officials said. So far, police don’t think there was an incident that led up to the shooting. This year is shaping up to be the worst year for US gun violence in decades, surpassing even last year’s unusually high numbers. A total of 14,516 people died from gun violence in the US from January 1 to September 15, marking a 9% increase over last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive. There have been 498 mass shootings during that period -- a 15% increase over last year.” Read more at CNN
“Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley announced on Twitter Friday morning he will run for an eighth term, a move that makes it more likely the GOP can keep control of his seat in next year's midterm elections.
Grassley romped to a seventh term in 2016 by 25 percentage points and will face former Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer in next year's general election.
Grassley turned 88 this month but Republican Party leaders have nonetheless pressed him to seek reelection amid their broader efforts to claim the Senate majority next year.” Read more at Politico
“In a local news interview published Wednesday, author and venture capitalist turned Senate candidate J.D. Vance suggested he would support prohibiting abortion even in cases of rape and incest—and dismissed those catalysts as ‘inconvenient.’
Asked by Curtis Jackson of Spectrum News 1 in Columbus, OH, whether a woman should be forced to give birth even if the pregnancy was the result of incest or rape, Vance replied that ‘the question betrays a certain presumption that’s wrong.’
‘It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term; it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society,’ said Vance, who lags behind several Republican candidates in his Ohio primary. ‘The question to me is really about the baby. We want women to have opportunities, we want women to have choices, but, above all, we want women and young boys in the womb to have a right to life.’
The exchange came amid an extended discussion about abortion laws in light of the broadly criticized new Texas ban on the procedure, which does not make exceptions for rape and incest. Vance, a multimillionaire investor whose 2016 bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, detailed the plight of Appalachia’s poor, defended the ban, saying that ‘in Texas they’re trying to make it easier for babies to be born.’
He also claimed, falsely, that “the Supreme Court has upheld the Texas law,” referring to the Court’s eleventh-hour split decision last month to let the ban go into effect rather than issue an emergency injunction. Vance, a Yale Law grad, also stated that ‘the fundamental problem with abortion law in this country’ is that it is ‘unsustainable and unstable.’ Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling which defined those laws, was decided 48 years ago.
Legislators in Ohio, a nominal swing state which has in recent election cycles shaded more deeply red, have passed increasingly restrictive abortion laws over the past decade. Those efforts include a 2019 bill that would have banned abortion after six weeks, which was stayed by a federal judge. The state’s current laws ban abortions after 20 weeks, and only make exceptions for severe risks to the mother’s health, according to the Guttmacher Institute.
Vance campaign press secretary Taylor Van Kirk provided a statement claiming Vance did not say rape and incest were ‘inconvenient’ circumstances.
‘Nowhere in the interview cited does JD actually say what the Daily Beast is dishonestly claiming he said. The transcript of the interview bears this out as that phrase is never uttered and JD even rejects the entire premise of the question he was asked by the interviewer,’ the statement said. ‘The Daily Beast’s pathetic attempt to put words in his mouth show that they’ve traded in any semblance of journalistic integrity to be full on leftwing political activists.’ (A recording of the interview can be heard here.)” Read more at Daily Beast
“California enacted a new law targeting Amazon warehouse quotas. The legislation requires disclosure of workplace-productivity metrics and limits some enforcement of employer policies. It is the first law to address Amazon’s use of quotas to gauge workers’ productivity and comes after years of complaints about work conditions in its facilities, which the company has promised to improve.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“The US House of Representatives voted Thursday to approve $1 billion in spending on Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, despite objections from progressive legislators like Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI).” [Vox] Read more at CBS / Melissa Quinn
“Germany faces a historic general election Sunday as voters determine who will succeed longtime Chancellor Angela Merkel. Merkel, who has led the country since 2005, announced in 2018 that she would not seek reelection after her term. She'll step down once a successor is clear, which may take days or weeks. This landmark decision could open the door for a significant shift in German politics. Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union and the left-leaning Social Democratic Party dominate German politics, but the Green Party is gaining ground, and a far-right party jockeys for fourth place in the hierarchy. The three top parties are well represented now, and the election is bound to be close, as polling suggests a large number of undecided voters.” Read more at CNN
“China’s central bank said all cryptocurrency-related transactions are illegal, reinforcing the country’s tough stance against digital rivals to government issued money.
In a statement posted on its website on Friday afternoon, the People’s Bank of China said the latest notice was to further prevent the risks surrounding crypto trading and to maintain national security and social stability.
The price of bitcoin fell as much as 5% following the announcement.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“China is preparing for the demise of Evergrande.
The massive, heavily indebted private-sector property developer is close to defaulting on some of its billions of dollars in debt. The organization—which for years borrowed extensively to amass land while paying large dividends to shareholders—had nearly $78 billion in revenue in 2020 and hundreds of projects in more than 200 Chinese cities. Evergrande’s problems started to emerge last year when pandemic lockdowns hurt property sales for months, before snowballing into cash-crunch concerns. Early economic fallout from Covid-19 had sparked a home-buying frenzy in China as the government turned to property investment to help offset drops in exports and domestic spending. But as rising home prices sparked fears of a potential bubble, Beijing has recently cracked down on real-estate developers’ borrowing. Authorities are now asking local governments to prepare to help limit potential unrest and job losses—though only at the last minute—if Evergrande can’t sort out its affairs in an orderly fashion.” Read more at Wall Street Journal
“PARIS — Beneath France’s angry outbursts about a secretive ‘knife-in-the-back’ US deal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia lay a single question that, as the French say, put the finger where it hurts.
After much tiptoeing in France around the issue, the newspaper L’Opinion asked at the top of its front page a question familiar to anybody who knows ‘Snow White.’
‘Mirror, mirror on the wall, tell me if I’m still a great power?’
Europe is speckled with fading former imperial powers. But France has clung more than most to its past as a great power, still seeing itself as having global interests partly because of territorial possessions in the Indo-Pacific and the Caribbean. Imbued with a sense of grandeur, France harks back to the Enlightenment to speak about fighting obscurantism in the world today and proffers its secular universalism as a model for modern societies. It often punches above its geopolitical weight, although it also overreaches.
The question of whether France is still a great power — not only the answer, but also the fact that it is still being asked — shows how its past glory continues to shape its national psyche. The flip side — the repeated assertion that France is suffering from an existential decline — is one of the most potent themes in French domestic politics, pushed forward mostly by the right and far right.” Read more at Boston Globe
“Serhiy Sefir, a top adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, survived an assassination attempt just outside Kyiv on Wednesday; no culprit or motive has been identified, but police and politicians believe the attempt could be due to the administration’s crackdown on corruption.” [Vox] Read more at WP / Robyn Dixon
“Trump formula | Taking a page from former U.S. President Donald Trump, President Jair Bolsonaro has attacked Brazil’s congress and top judges as corrupt and claimed without evidence that his opponents are hijacking voting systems. His tactics come as he faces a difficult reelection campaign, is under criminal investigation and trails his likely opponent, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, in the polls.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“Iceland’s election. Iceland votes on Saturday in parliamentary elections with polls pointing to a murky outcome with no party likely to win more than one-fifth of the public’s support, and nine parties expected to win seats. Even a three-party coalition may not be mathematically viable, so an unprecedented—and unstable—four-party coalition is likely.” Read more at Foreign Policy
“1990s supermodel: Linda Evangelista says a fat-freezing procedure left her ‘disfigured.’” Read more at New York Times
“Lives Lived: Barbara Campbell Cooke was Sam Cooke’s teenage sweetheart, but their marriage turned tragic. When she then married the singer Bobby Womack, who had been her husband’s protégé, the publicity was intense and the boos were loud. She died at 85.” Read more at New York Times