Replies to post #47443 on Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[scion]

The false GOP claim that Pelosi turned down National Guard before Jan. 6 attack

Fact Checker Analysis
By Salvador Rizzo Reporter Today at 3:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/28/false-gop-claim-that-pelosi-turned-down-national-guard-before-jan-6-attack/

“There’s questions into the leadership within, the structure of the speaker’s office, where they denied the ability to bring the National Guard here. ... We start with a committee chair who will tell you, ‘Everything’s on the table except the speaker’s office.’ How can you ever get to the bottom of the questions? How can you ever get to the solutions to make sure the Capitol is never put in this position again?”

— House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), at a news conference, July 27, 2021

“It is a fact that ... in December of 2020, Nancy Pelosi was made aware of potential security threats to the Capitol and she failed to act. It is a fact that the U.S. Capitol Police raised concerns and rather than providing them with the support and resources they needed and they deserved, she prioritized her partisan political optics over their safety.”

— House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), at the news conference, July 27, 2021

Republicans accused House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) of failing to protect the U.S. Capitol from the attack on Jan. 6, claiming she ignored warnings about potential threats and denied a request to bring in reinforcements from the National Guard.

Many fact-checkers have rated these claims false. In March, we gave Four Pinocchios to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a close ally of former president Donald Trump, for leveling the same accusation at Pelosi without proof.

Five months later, it’s not just Jordan anymore. In a news conference held moments before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol held its first hearing, McCarthy and Stefanik, two top Republican leaders, said Pelosi failed to act on warning signs leading up to the riot.

“The American people deserve to know the truth that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6th,” Stefanik said.

We asked representatives for McCarthy and Stefanik what proof they had. Just like Jordan five months earlier, they had none.

The Facts

Before leaving office, Trump held a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6 and repeatedly urged attendees to march on Congress as lawmakers were certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. For months, Trump had been making false claims that rampant electoral fraud had cost him a winning margin of victory in key states.

“I said something’s wrong here, something is really wrong,” Trump said at the close of his Jan. 6 speech. “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

A mob stormed the Capitol, delaying the vote certification for hours. Many of the rioters have saiBefore leaving office, Trump held a rally outside the White House on Jan. 6 and repeatedly urged attendees to march on Congress as lawmakers were certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. For months, Trump had been making false claims that rampant electoral fraud had cost him a winning margin of victory in key states.

The riot led to five deaths, assaults on about 140 police officers and the evacuation of Congress. Authorities have estimated that about 10,000 people descended on the Capitol campus and that about 800 broke into the building. To date, about 550 have been charged with crimes.

The Democratic-controlled House passed a resolution in March to create a bipartisan commission styled after the 9/11 Commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, but the proposal did not get enough Republican support to advance in the Senate. The House then established a select committee to investigate the events of Jan. 6, led by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.

The accusations that Pelosi was aware of intelligence reports of a potential threat to the Capitol on Jan. 6, or that she turned down a request for reinforcements from the National Guard, have never been backed by proof.

There are three key players here: Steven A. Sund, the U.S. Capitol Police chief; Paul D. Irving, the House sergeant-at-arms, and Michael C. Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms. All three resigned under pressure after the Jan. 6 insurrection. Sund said he ran the National Guard request by Irving and Stenger on Jan. 4 and neither supported the idea.

In a Feb. 1 letter to Pelosi, Sund wrote that he “approached the two Sergeants at Arms to request the assistance of the National Guard, as I had no authority to do so without an Emergency Declaration by the Capitol Police Board (CPB).” He said he spoke first to Irving, who “stated that he was concerned about the ‘optics’ and didn’t feel that the intelligence supported it.” Irving suggested Sund check in with Stenger, at the time chair of the CPB, and get his thoughts. “Instead of approving the use of the National Guard, however, Mr. Stenger suggested I ask them how quickly we could get support if needed and to ‘lean forward’ in case we had to request assistance on January 6,” Sund wrote.

Sund said he then contacted Gen. William Walker, commanding officer of the D.C. National Guard. Walker “advised that he could repurpose 125 National Guard and have them to me fairly quickly, once approved. I asked General Walker to be prepared in the event that we requested them.”

Note that there is no indication that Pelosi was at all involved. Irving supposedly had made a vague reference to “optics,” but there is no indication what that means. Moreover, Stenger, the Senate sergeant-at-arms, was also reluctant to support an immediate dispatching of National Guard troops. So there is little reason to suggest Irving, acting under Pelosi’s direction, alone was responsible. It appeared to have been a joint decision.

At a Senate hearing Jan. 23, Irving said that the proposed National Guard troops were to be unarmed and only to “work traffic control near the Capitol.” He included an explanation of the term optics: “My use of the word optics has been mischaracterized in the media. Let me be clear. Optics as portrayed in the media played no role whatsoever in my decisions about security. And any suggestion to the contrary is false. Safety was always paramount when making security plans for January 6th.”

In his questioning, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) tried to drill down deeper in the conversations among Sund, Irving and Stenger. He asked Irving: “Were you concerned that having the Guard present would look like it was to militarize? Were you concerned about the criticism of the Guard being deployed in Washington … earlier this summer?”

In this question, Hawley was getting at the heart of the question about “optics” — the belief among some Republicans that Pelosi somehow had communicated to Irving that she did not want images of National Guard troops at the Capitol, given what had happened during the criminal justice protests after the George Floyd killing.

Irving, in his response to Hawley, threw cold water on such speculation.

“Senator, I was not concerned about appearance whatsoever. It was all about safety and security,” Irving said. “Any reference would have been related to appropriate use of force, display of force. And ultimately, the question on the table, when we look at any security asset, is: Does the intelligence warrant it? Is the security plan [a] match with the intelligence? And again, the collective answer was yes.”

Later in the hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) asked whether Irving or Stenger had communicated the Jan. 4 decision on National Guard troops to congressional leadership.

“On Jan. 4, no, I had no follow-up conversations,” Irving said. “And it was not until the 6th that I alerted leadership that we might be making a request. And that was the end of the discussion.”

“For myself, it was Jan. 6 that I mentioned it to Leader [Mitch] McConnell’s staff,” Stenger said.

Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, previously told us there had been no discussions between Irving and either Pelosi or her staff about National Guard deployment before Jan. 6. “We are not involved in the day-to-day operations of that office at all,” he said. “We expect security professionals to make security decisions.”

In a statement on Tuesday that linked to fact-checks of similar claims over the last few months, Pelosi’s office said “every single lie uttered by the Republicans this morning has been debunked time and again.”

A Senate report into the Jan. 6 attack found: “The entities responsible for securing and protecting the Capitol Complex and everyone onsite that day were not prepared for a large-scale attack, despite being aware of the potential for violence targeting the Capitol. …

“The failures leading up to and on January 6 were not limited to legislative branch entities. As has been made clear in the Committees’ two public hearings on the subject, failures extended to a number of executive branch agencies. A key contributing factor to the tragic events of January 6 was the failure of the Intelligence Community to properly analyze, assess, and disseminate information to law enforcement regarding the potential for violence and the known threats to the Capitol and the Members present that day.”

In response to our questions, Stefanik issued a statement that falsely claimed “the sergeant-at-arms is a political appointee of Speaker Nancy Pelosi and can be fired by Pelosi at any time.” Irving, a former Secret Service supervisor, had been appointed in 2012 by then-House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

Stefanik added that throughout December, “multiple intelligence reports” had been “shared with the Capitol Police, raising concerns about January 6th.” “The speaker’s office was aware of these concerns as reported by The Washington Post and chose not to act,” she said. In support of that claim, a Stefanik spokesman linked to a report in The Post that does not say Pelosi failed to act on intelligence reports about potential threats.

A spokesman for McCarthy said, “Evidence shows that then-Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving reported to Speaker Pelosi and he denied approval to bring in the National Guard (when asked by Chief Sund) prior to January 6.”

The spokesman, Mark Bednar, added: “The allegation is not that Nancy Pelosi said no National Guard. The concern is that the speaker, as the highest-ranking individual on the Capitol complex, had security responsibility for the Capitol, the security apparatus reported to her — and they said no, prior to the 6th.”

That’s different from what McCarthy said at the news conference, claiming that Pelosi (in his words, “the structure of the speaker’s office”) somehow stumped the request for the National Guard.

McCarthy also made another claim at this news conference suggesting Democrats were asleep at the wheel when it came to securing the Capitol.

He suggested that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), a Pelosi ally on the select committee investigating Jan. 6 and the chair of the House Administration Committee, which supervises the Capitol Police, had not held hearings into security matters since a report was issued by the Capitol Police’s inspector general.

“You had a chair of House administration with responsibility that did not come to the Capitol for more than six months,” McCarthy said. “First time showing back up? On January 3rd to vote for the speaker. No hearings about the IG report, no movement of Rodney Davis’s bill.”

McCarthy’s office did not say which inspector general report he was referring to, but the House Administration Committee has held five hearings on the Jan. 6 attack since the Capitol Police inspector general issued its first report and recommendations in February.

One of the hearings, titled “Reforming the Capitol Police and Improving Accountability for the Capitol Police Board,” was held weeks after Republicans on the committee, including the ranking Republican, Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.), called for such reforms to the Capitol Police’s oversight structure. (The House Administration Committee did not take a six-month hiatus. It held virtual hearings during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.)

The Pinocchio Test

Repeating a false claim does not make it truer. No evidence has emerged to suggest that Pelosi ignored intelligence reports about potential threats or turned down a request for reinforcements from the National Guard as officials prepared for Jan. 6.

Under pointed questioning in the Senate on Jan. 23, security officials did not say Pelosi blocked requests for backup. Irving, the former House sergeant-at-arms, testified: “It was not until the 6th that I alerted leadership that we might be making a request. And that was the end of the discussion.”

McCarthy, Stefanik and all the others leveling this baseless charge earn Four Pinocchios.

Four Pinocchios

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By Salvador Rizzo
Salvador Rizzo is a reporter for The Fact Checker. He previously covered New Jersey politics and Gov. Chris Christie, with stints at the Star-Ledger, the Bergen Record and the New York Observer. Twitter
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/07/28/false-gop-claim-that-pelosi-turned-down-national-guard-before-jan-6-attack/

[scion]

What the Jan. 6 Committee Could Mean for Trump

As the right wing attacks the four officers who testified in the first hearing, the new Capitol Police chief says he is proud of them.

by BRIAN KAREM JULY 28, 2021 5:30 AM
https://thebulwark.com/what-the-jan-6-committee-could-mean-for-trump/

Six months after an insurrectionist mob attacked our democracy, the U.S. Congress has taken up the cause of determining who was behind it and who should pay for it. Some consider it a study in foregone conclusions. Some don’t want it investigated at all. And others who protected members of Congress on January 6 say they can’t put the day’s events behind them until those responsible are brought to justice.

After the GOP fought tooth and nail not to investigate the riot, the committee put together by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has two Republicans on it: Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, pariahs inside the GOP because they decided to put country before their party.

Kinzinger in his opening statement was reduced to tears at several points as he explained what was at stake:

- Like all Americans, I am frustrated that six months after a deadly riot breached the United States Capitol for several hours on live television … we still don’t know exactly what happened. Why? Because many in my party have treated this as just another partisan fight. It’s toxic, and it’s a disservice to the officers and their families, to the staff and employees on the Capitol Complex, and to the American people who deserve the truth.

And it’s why I agreed to serve on this committee. I want to know what happened that day, but more importantly, I want all Americans to be able to trust the work this committee does and get the facts out there, free of conspiracy.

This cannot continue to be a partisan fight. I am a Republican, I am a conservative, but in order to heal from the damage caused that day, we need to call out the facts. It’s time to stop the outrage and conspiracies that fuel violence and division in our country, and most importantly, we need to reject those that promote it. As a country, it’s time to learn from our past mistakes, rebuild stronger so this never happens again, and move onward.

In serving on this committee, I am here to investigate January 6th—not in spite of my membership in the Republican Party, but because of it—not to win a political fight, but to learn the facts. -

“We don’t blame victims. We go after criminals,” Kinzinger proclaimed.

That sentiment was echoed by Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn. “If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, the hitman goes to jail—but not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6th and a hitman sent them.” Dunn wants Congress to go after who hired the hitman.

Tuesday’s hearing was filled with emotion, as four officers who served on the front line during the insurrection testified as to the danger they faced—how they were beaten, denigrated, and threatened by as many as 9,000 insurrectionists who faced off with a few hundred officers.

When asked what he and the other officers were fighting for on January 6, D.C. Metropolitan Police Officer Daniel Hodges, who was nearly crushed between two doors during the riots, replied that “it was for democracy, it was for the men and women of the House and Senate, it was for each other, and it was for the future of the country.”

Officer Michael Fanone, beaten unconscious and nearly killed by his own weapon, appealed to the insurrectionists not to kill him, yelling “I’ve got kids.” Fanone, who is himself a conservative Republican, told the committee:

At no point that day did I ever think about the politics of that crowd. Even the things that were being said did not resonate in the midst of that chaos. But what did resonate was the fact that thousands of Americans were attacking police officers who were simply there doing their job and that they were there to disrupt members of Congress who were doing their job.

Officer Harry Dunn testified how the crowd was filled with racists hurling insults at him as they pressed forward on the Hill. “No one had ever, ever called me a ni**er while wearing a uniform of a Capitol Police officer,” he stated bluntly. Dunn said that another black officer told him that “he had never, in his entire forty years of life, been called a ni**er to his face, and that streak ended on January 6th.”

“Is this America?” Dunn asked rhetorically, only to later answer that it was—but it isn’t all that America is.

Aquilino Gonell, a Capitol Police sergeant, relayed how officers were attacked multiple times. He’s still suffering from his injuries and faces another year of surgeries and rehab because of it. Gonell is a naturalized citizen, a veteran of Iraq, and said he’d never faced anything there like he faced in January. The insurrection was “totally different—this is our own citizens,” he said.

And Gonell said he knew who was behind it all. It wasn’t Antifa. It wasn’t Black Lives Matter. It wasn’t the FBI. And it sure as hell wasn’t a bunch of friendly tourists.

According to Gonell, it was Donald Trump.

While all of the witnesses during the committee’s first day of hearings said there should be no politics behind finding who was responsible and holding them accountable, this being D.C., you cannot take the politics out of the mix.

It even extends to the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, who has distanced himself from the proceedings. He’s in the middle of his own mess, still dealing with a pandemic made worse by the GOP. Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s daily briefing on Tuesday dealt with a variety of questions about vaccinated adults having to put face masks back on because of the rapidly spreading Delta variant of the coronavirus. She took just one question on the insurrection hearing, and made quick work of it.

“The president has had a range of meetings and briefings and engagements this morning. I know he’s intending to catch updates and clips, and certainly staff will share with him what they’ve seen as we’ve watched the briefings, but he has not been in a position, via his schedule, to watch the hearings this morning,” she said. And she told us that Biden would have no statement to make on the hearing.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, usually the most vocal man in the country, also said nothing about the hearings Tuesday.

But many of his supporters took to social media to attack the testimony of the four police officers and belittling them at every turn, calling them actors, liars, and worse. Some of Trump’s supporters in the media took the same tack—such as Laura Ingraham, who said the officers deserved acting awards:

Among the texts belittling the officers that I received from Trump supporters: “I heard that one of the ‘bad guys’ even called a cop a bad word. Oh the horror of it all.” Another, from a QAnon supporter who often texts me, said it was obvious that the events of January 6 were allowed to happen so the Democrats could exploit them for political reasons.

Yet at the same time, many of these very same people would have you believe the rioters were nothing more than friendly tourists—or, as Trump said earlier this month, “peaceful people” and “great people” having a “lovefest.”

“If that’s what American tourists are like I can see why foreign countries don’t like American tourists,” Officer Hodges said with a straight face.

“I watched the entire hearing,” the newly sworn-in U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger told me on Tuesday night. “Proud of all four of them. Their voices need to be heard.”

In the end, when Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) asked the officers what they wanted to see result from the committee’s work, it was Hodges who said it best:

As patrol officers, we can only deal with the crimes that happen on the streets. . . . You guys are the only ones we’ve got to deal with crimes that occur above us. I need you guys to address if anyone in power had a role in this—if anyone in power coordinated, or aided, or abetted, or tried to downplay or tried to prevent the investigation of this terrorist attack. Because we can’t do it. We’re not allowed to. And I think a majority of Americans are really looking forward to that as well.

If you want to know who was behind the insurrection, we all know it was Donald Trump.

Even Republican leaders knew that once, before their partisan amnesia kicked in.

Remember when Kevin McCarthy said “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters”?

Remember when Mitch McConnell said “The mob was fed lies. . . . They were provoked by the president and other powerful people, and they tried to use fear and violence to stop a specific proceeding of a branch of the federal government.”

Remember when top Trump administration officials, including cabinet officers, resigned out of disgust at Trump’s incitement?

The question remains what, if anything will be done about it.

Tuesday’s hearing showed that whatever happens, it will go badly for Trump. He’s in the crosshairs. He incited the riot. And, as Raskin said, the police officers fought to hold the line on January 6—and now Congress must hold the line.

If these hearings are effective, they could mark the beginning of the end for Trump as an effective actor or credible candidate on the national stage.

If he does not run again, historians will have a variety of theories to explain why.

But it may just be that four working-class cops—the kind he claims to love—will get the credit for driving a stake through his heart.


Brian Karem
Brian Karem is the senior White House correspondent for Playboy magazine. He successfully sued Donald Trump to keep his press pass after Trump tried to suspend it. He has also gone to jail to defend a reporter's right to keep confidential sources.

https://thebulwark.com/what-the-jan-6-committee-could-mean-for-trump/

[scion]

The Recount @therecount TRESPASSING: GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz are denied entry to a corrections facility holding January 6th prisoners.

VIDEO

TRESPASSING: GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz are denied entry to a corrections facility holding January 6th prisoners. pic.twitter.com/DCxUkvamzC

— The Recount (@therecount) July 29, 2021

5:45 PM · Jul 29, 2021·Twitter Media Studio

THREAD

TRESPASSING: GOP Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Louie Gohmert, and Matt Gaetz are denied entry to a corrections facility holding January 6th prisoners. pic.twitter.com/DCxUkvamzC

— The Recount (@therecount) July 29, 2021

Notice that all three of them are wearing masks....