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Post by Admin on May 13, 2021 4:40:05 GMT
Two top Trump administration officials testified Wednesday that President Donald Trump never contacted them on Jan. 6 as rioters overran the Capitol and engaged in brutal combat with police officers. Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller said at a House Oversight Committee hearing that they had no interaction with Trump during the riot. “I did not,” Rosen said under questioning by Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) “I did not require any authorities that the department didn’t already have.” Miller echoed the same message. “I had all the authority I needed, and I knew what had to happen,” the former defense official said, adding that Trump had given him that authority in the days before the riot. “I think that the lack of direct communication from President Trump speaks volumes,” Maloney said. Sparks flew between Democrats on the panel and the Trump appointees as lawmakers accused Miller of changing his account to sound more favorable to Trump and faulted Rosen for refusing to discuss his conversations with the president, as well as for dramatic events at the Justice Department in the days leading up to the riot. While Miller said in a media interview and in his prepared statement for Wednesday’s hearing that Trump encouraged the protesters on Jan. 6, he took a different tack in his live testimony. “I think now I would say that is not the unitary factor at all…I have reassessed,” Miller said. “It seems clear there was an organized assault element in place that was going to assault regardless of what the president said.” Miller also went further than Rosen, seemingly defending Trump by insisting that the former president fulfilled his constitutional duties in connection with the storming of the Capitol, which took place as Congress was scheduled to certify the electoral vote. When asked to assess whether heated political rhetoric was to blame for the riot, Miller painted in very broad strokes and didn't point a finger at Trump. “I think the entire entertainment, media, political complex is culpable in creating this environment that is just intolerable and needs to change,” the former defense chief said.
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Post by Admin on May 19, 2021 19:47:37 GMT
Here’s a shock—Donald Trump doesn’t want to hear any more talk of an investigation into the insurrection that was carried out by his biggest fans right after he whipped them up into a frenzy on Jan. 6. On Wednesday, the House is set to vote on legislation that would set up a 9/11-style bipartisan commission to investigate the MAGA riot at the U.S. Capitol. But, on Tuesday night, Trump ordered his Republican minions in Congress to resist, writing in a statement that his allies in the House and the Senate should not fall for the “Democrat trap” of backing the commission. He wrote: “It is just more partisan unfairness and unless the murders, riots, and fire bombings in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Chicago, and New York are also going to be studied, this discussion should be ended immediately.” Meanwhile, Axios reports that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has fallen in behind Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in telling colleagues that he will not be supporting the commission as things stand. Read it at The Hill
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Post by Admin on Jun 29, 2021 3:38:06 GMT
Working on the second floor of the West Wing allowed aides to avoid dealing with President Donald Trump because he never walked up the stairs to get to the upper floor, a forthcoming book by author Michael Wolff said.
Wolff wrote that working out of the second-floor office, as Trump advisors Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller opted to do, "meant a degree of exclusion but also protection" because "Trump would never climb the stairs (and, by the end of his term, he never had)."
An excerpt of Wolff's book "Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency" published in New York Magazine on Monday shed more light on the confusion among Trump and his hollowed-out circle of aides as the January 6 insurrection unfolded.
The unlikelihood of Trump climbing those stairs was first reported by The Washington Post in January 2017, during the early days of the Trump administration.
"Though Conway took over the workspace previously occupied by Valerie Jarrett, who had been Obama's closest adviser, the confidant dismissively predicted that Trump would rarely climb a flight of stairs," The Post said at the time.
In April, Trump lodged a rare defense of President Joe Biden after he took a tumble on the stairs of Air Force One while leaving Joint Base Andrews in March. Trump defended Biden against criticisms that he is too old, and compared Biden's plane stumble to when he struggled to walk down a ramp at West Point in June 2020.
"I know that if it were me, they would be up and down, going crazy," Trump told Fox News' Sean Hannity. "I had an instance where on a slippery, slippery ramp, a piece of steel, very steep and very long railings ... and it was pouring at West Point." He added, "The last thing I want to do is go down because when Gerald Ford went down and it was not good."
"Landslide" is scheduled to be published by Henry Holt & Co. on July 27.
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Post by Admin on Jul 28, 2021 22:08:21 GMT
WATCH: House investigation of Jan. 6 attack begins with police testimony
Retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honoré, who was tasked by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with conducting a review of the US Capitol's security after January 6, on Tuesday said President Donald Trump's White House was complicit in orchestrating the insurrection.
"It's my personal opinion that the executive branch was complicit in the planning and the delayed response that occurred in bringing in more federal assistance to the Capitol that day," Honoré said during an MSNBC appearance, underscoring that he had not reached this conclusion from the security review he spearheaded.
"That's my own perception, based on what I've seen and what I've heard and by the fact the former president is continuing to tell people, 'This was not a riot, it meant no harm, it was like a picnic,'" Honoré said, adding, "The last I heard from him, he told them to go to the Capitol and raise hell."
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During an incendiary speech near the White House shortly before the violence at the Capitol, Trump told lies about the 2020 election and called on his supporters to "fight like hell."
Trump was impeached for provoking the insurrection, but he was acquitted in the Senate with the help of his Republican allies — including GOP lawmakers who had said he bore responsibility for the deadly riot.
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Post by Admin on Aug 19, 2021 20:16:31 GMT
A North Carolina man surrendered Thursday afternoon to police, hours after telling them he had a bomb in his truck parked outside the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill. That threat by the suspect, Floyd Ray Roseberry, led to the evacuation of the library, the Supreme Court, the Cannon House Office Building, and the offices of the Republican National Committee. It also sparked a massive police response to an area that seven months earlier saw the Capitol complex violently invaded by supporters of then-President Donald Trump. “He got out of the vehicle and surrendered, and the tactical units that were close by took him into custody without incident,” U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said about the 49-year-old Roseberry. “He gave up and did not resist,” Manger said. “As far as we could tell it was just his decision to surrender at that point.”
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