Some stuff you probably already know; some stuff you may not.
The Fish Stinks From the Head
So the January 6th Committee subpoenas Donald Trump.
BY HAROLD MEYERSON OCTOBER 13, 2022
... Some new details, however, strengthened the committee’s case. Detail one was the revelation that, just one week after the election, Trump ordered the Defense Department to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Somalia by January 15th, so he could claim to have ended those interventions before his presidency ended. (The ancillary message the committee was putting out, of course, is that if you think Biden’s Afghan withdrawal was precipitous, you should have seen what Trump ordered—which Defense officials resolutely ignored.) [emphasis mine]
Detail two came closer to what makes Trump tick than anything the committee has previously revealed. In this case, it was a new snippet of testimony from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, who was discussing Trump’s rage at the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his case on December 11th—three days before the states confirmed their electoral voters. On that date, Cassidy testified, in the midst of his tirade, Trump walked by Meadows and Cassidy and told them, Hutchinson said, “I don’t want people to know we lost. This is embarrassing.” [emphasis mine]
... Detail three was a little more from the recorded conversation Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he implored Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes for Trump to carry that state. “I need 11,000 votes,” Trump said, “give me a break.”...
[Evidence of premeditation:]
Detail four was a host of email and other messages among Secret Service agents and other security agencies, detailing their advance knowledge of just how violent January 6th would be, and that White House officials were privy to these messages... [emphasis mine]
Detail five came from the testimony of a presidential security agent who recalled how the security detail was “in a state of shock” about Trump’s insistence, as the insurrectionists surged around and into the Capitol, that he go there as well, to lead the mob he’d sent.
Detail six was a previously unheard question-and-answer sequence in which Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone was asked by Rep. Liz Cheney about the many people who urged Trump to tell the mob to leave the Capitol. “Who in the White House,” she asked, “didn’t want those people to leave the Capitol?” Cipollone paused and then said, “I can’t think of anybody on staff who didn’t want them to leave.” Then Cheney asked him whether Trump did, to which Cipollone, as Trump’s lawyer, said he couldn’t answer that.
https://prospect.org/politics/fish-stinks-from-the-head-january-6th-committee-subpoena-trump/
