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When Representative Liz Cheney asserted at the House Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday that Trump administration cabinet members weighed invoking the constitutional process to remove President Donald J. Trump from office after the attack on the Capitol by his supporters, she did not immediately provide details or evidence.

But as the federal government convulsed in the hours and days after the deadly riot, a range of cabinet officials weighed their options, and consulted one another about how to steady the administration and ensure a peaceful transition to a new presidency.

Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state at the time, and Steven Mnuchin, then the Treasury secretary, discussed the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, which would have required the vice president and the majority of the cabinet to agree that the president could no longer fulfill his duties to begin a complex process of removal from office.

Their discussion was reported by Jonathan Karl of ABC News in his book Betrayal, and described to The New York Times by a person briefed on the discussion. Mr. Pompeo has denied the exchange took place, and Mr. Mnuchin has declined to comment.

Betsy DeVos, Mr. Trumps education secretary, told USA Today this week that she raised with Vice President Mike Pence whether the cabinet should consider the 25th Amendment. But Mr. Pence, she said, made it very clear that he was not going to go in that direction.

She decided to resign. So did Matt Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser.

Eugene Scalia, then the labor secretary, discussed with colleagues right after the attack the need to steady the administration, according to three people familiar with the conversations.

Mr. Scalia called an aide to Mr. Pence, they said, to say that he was uncomfortable with Mr. Trump functioning without something of a check on him in that moment, and that there needed to be more involvement from the cabinet. Mr. Pences team did not want to make such a move.

Mr. Scalia also had a conversation with Mr. Pompeo, which Mr. Pompeo shared with multiple people, in which Mr. Scalia suggested that someone should talk to Mr. Trump about the need do something to restore confidence in the government and a peaceful transition of power. In Mr. Pompeos rendering of that conversation, disputed by others, Mr. Scalia also suggested that someone should talk to Mr. Trump about resigning.

Mr. Pompeo replied sarcastically by asking how Mr. Scalia imagined that conversation with Mr. Trump would go.

Mr. Scalia and Mr. Pompeo, through an aide, declined to comment.

The reference by Ms. Cheney, a Wyoming Republican and the vice chairwoman of the House Jan. 6 committee, to the 25th Amendment being under consideration by cabinet members was one of the most striking assertions in the panels two-hour hearing. In the first of six planned public hearings, the committee presented a detailed case against Mr. Trump and the rioters who stormed the Capitol and delayed the congressional certification of the Electoral College results.

The panel has signaled that it plans to use the discussions about the 25th Amendment to show not only the chaos that Mr. Trump set off by helping stoke the riot but how little confidence those around him had in his ability to be president.

You will hear about members of the Trump cabinet discussing the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment, and replacing the president of the United States, Ms. Cheney said as she read her opening statement at the hearing. Multiple members of President Trumps own cabinet resigned immediately after Jan. 6.

In addition to Ms. DeVos, the transportation secretary, Elaine Chao the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader also resigned.

At the hearing on Thursday, Ms. Cheney also asserted that Republican lawmakers who had been involved in helping Mr. Trump overturn the election sought pardons from the White House in the final days of the administration. The committee plans to use the pardon requests as evidence of how those who helped Mr. Trump had a consciousness of guilt about what they had done.

Ms. Cheney did not provide any evidence to substantiate her assertion, and she named only one lawmaker, Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, as a pardon seeker.

In an email, Jay Ostrich, a spokesman for Mr. Perry, called the assertion a ludicrous and soulless lie.

Ms. Cheney promised that she would reveal supporting evidence at upcoming hearings, and a person familiar with the committees investigation said the panel had received testimony about the pardon requests.

Mr. Perry coordinated a plan to try to replace the acting attorney general, who was resisting Mr. Trumps attempts to investigate baseless election-fraud reports, with a more compliant official. Mr. Perry also endorsed the idea of encouraging Mr. Trumps supporters to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6.

The committees next hearing is scheduled for Monday, where the panel plans to lay out how Mr. Trump and his allies stoked the Big Lie that the election had been stolen. Two more hearings are scheduled for next week one on Wednesday about the attempt at the Justice Department to oust the acting attorney general, and another on Thursday about the pressure campaign on Mr. Pence to block or delay certification of the electoral vote count.

Three former Justice Department officials have agreed to testify at the Wednesday hearing, according to a letter sent to the committee on Friday.

The three witnesses Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was the acting attorney general, Richard P. Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general, and Steven A. Engel, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel all participated in a tense meeting just before the Jan. 6 attack, where Mr. Trump considered firing Mr. Rosen and installing a loyalist in his place.

Even before Jan. 6, government officials under Mr. Trump had discussed invoking the 25th Amendment.

In the spring of 2017, after Mr. Trump fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director, the deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, rattled by Mr. Trumps handling of the dismissal, raised the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment in a meeting with senior Justice Department and F.B.I. officials.

The acting F.B.I. director, Andrew G. McCabe, had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Mr. Trumps ties to Russia and was pressing Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a special counsel. Mr. Rosenstein agreed that Mr. Trumps possible ties to Russia should be investigated but said that if an inquiry uncovered troubling evidence of Mr. Trumps ties to Russia, the only remedy would be to invoke the 25th Amendment.

Mr. Rosenstein then said that he had done the math and believed there were at least six cabinet officials who would go along with invoking it, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly. Despite raising the possibility, the idea went nowhere and Mr. Rosenstein appointed Robert S. Mueller III to be the special counsel.

In the years that followed, there were several disclosures about others who had discussed the possibility of invoking the amendment. In 2019, a book by an anonymous administration official recounted that senior White House officials believed that Mr. Pence would go along with invoking the amendment to oust Mr. Trump. Mr. Pence denied that claim.

A veteran CBS News producer named Ira Rosen wrote in his 2021 book about his time working in the news business that Stephen K. Bannon, the White House chief strategist until August 2017, had spoken with him about the 25th Amendment.

And Mark T. Esper, Mr. Trumps final Senate-confirmed defense secretary, wrote in his recent book, A Sacred Oath, about the aftermath of an incident when Mr. Trump delivered a diatribe against the military during a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the second half of his term.

Months later, one of the officers present told me in a phone call that he went home that evening deeply concerned about what he had seen in his commander in chief, Mr. Esper recounted, without identifying the person in question.

The next morning, he said in a very sober tone, he started reading up on the 25th Amendment and the role of the cabinet as a check on the president, Mr. Esper said. He wanted to understand what the cabinet needed to consider and what the process was.

Mr. Esper said that in his own view, Mr. Trumps behavior never rose to the standard required for invoking the 25th Amendment. But that was before the postelection period, by which time Mr. Esper had been fired by Mr. Trump.

Two days after the Capitol riot, Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke to Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

This is bad, but who knows what he might do? Ms. Pelosi said, according to the book Peril, by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa. Hes crazy. You know hes crazy. Hes been crazy for a long time. So dont say you dont know what his state of mind is.

Madam Speaker, General Milley replied, I agree with you on everything.

Luke Broadwater and Katie Benner contributed reporting.

Original post:
Jan. 6 Panel Puts Focus on Cabinet Discussions About Removing Trump - The New York Times

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Apparently gas prices were not high enough to keep more than 1,300 boat owners from turning out Saturday in Florida for a boat parade supporting Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. A flotilla of hundreds of boats traveled down the St. Johns River near Jacksonville during the Florida Republican Partys quarterly meeting, honoring DeSantis with a type of maritime display first put on the radar by supporters of former President Donald Trump. The fact that DeSantis is now being feted with such unabashed outpourings of love and patriotic flags could be further evidence that it is DeSantis, not Trump, who may be the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. Trump surely wont be pleased about his potential rival upstaging him in this way.

Boat parades became a common event in 2020 as the pandemic put a damper on in-person presidential campaign rallies, at least for a while. Organized by Trump superfans, the Trumptillas were never official campaign events, but were more organic initiatives in support of the former president. Trump was obsessed with the beautiful boaters, as he often called them, and aides reportedly showed him videos of the events to lift his spirits. The parades were frequently cited by Trump and his supporters as proof of his popularity despite his low poll numbers. Later, Trump reportedly pointed to them as evidence that he couldnt possibly have lost the election to President Joe Biden. Indeed, even this weekend, at least one conservative news outlet covering the DeSantis boat parade cited the absence of Democratic boat parades as a sign that Democrats really dont care for their politicians, or, for that matter, freedom.

But the boat parades have been something of a scourge for law enforcement, water safety officials, and other recreational boaters. A Daily Beast investigation last year found that the boat parades had left a wake of destruction behind them, far beyond what even made the news. Reporters turned up a number of people whose boats had been totaled or sunk in the wake of Trump boat parades in Tennessee and Oklahoma. Five boats sank in Lake Travis in September 2020 during a Trump boat parade near Austin, Texas, that created so much choppy water that the local police department fielded more than a dozen distress calls from boats that had been swamped, lost power or capsized. A month earlier, a Trump boat parade on the Willamette River in Portland, Oregon, sank the boat of a family that wasnt part of the parade.

The DeSantis parade seems to have proceeded without incident, and got rave reviews on Truth Social, Trumps own social media platform. Trump so far has not commented on the event.

Read the rest here:
Here's One Boat Parade Donald Trump Is Going to Hate - Mother Jones

The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed at its inaugural hearing that Donald Trumps top Republican allies in Congress sought pardons after the January 6 insurrection, a major disclosure that bolstered the claim that the event amounted to a coup and is likely to cause serious scrutiny for those implicated.

The news that multiple House Republicans asked the Trump White House for pardons an apparent consciousness of guilt was one of three revelations portending potentially perilous legal and political moments to come for Trump and his allies.

At the hearing, the panels vice-chair, Liz Cheney, named only one Republican member of Congress, congressman Scott Perry, the current chair of the ultra-conservative House freedom caucus, who sought a presidential pardon for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The select committee did not elaborate on which other House Republicans were asking for pardons or more significantly, for which crimes they were seeking pardons, but it appeared to show at the minimum that they knew they had been involved in probably illegal conduct.

The extraordinary claim also raised the prospect that the Republican members of Congress seeking clemency believed Trumps election fraud claims were baseless: for why would they need pardons if they really were only raising legitimate questions about the election.

Its hard to find a more explicit statement of consciousness of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions youve just taken, assisting in a plan to overthrow the results of a presidential election, Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, told reporters.

The disclosure about the pardons came during the opening hour of the hearing in which the panel made the case that Trump could not credibly believe he had won the 2020 election after some of his most senior advisers told him repeatedly that he had lost to Joe Biden.

Trump, according to videos of closed-door depositions played by the select committee, was told by his data experts he lost the election, told by the then attorney general, Bill Barr, that his election fraud claims were bullshit, a conclusion Ivanka Trump said she accepted.

The admissions by some of Trumps top aides are important since they could put federal prosecutors one step closer to being able to charge Trump with obstructing an official proceeding or defrauding the United States on the basis of election fraud claims he knew were false.

At the heart of the case the panel appears to be trying to make is the legal doctrine of willful blindness, as former US attorney Joyce Vance wrote for MSNBC, which says a defendant cannot say they were not aware of something if they were credibly notified of the truth.

The potential case against Trump might take the form that he could not use as his defense, against charges he violated the law to stop Bidens certification on January 6, that he believed there was election fraud, when he had been credibly notified it was bullshit.

Also in the first hour of the hearing, the select committee cast in a new light the contentious 18 December 2020 meeting Trump had at the White House with his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and former Trump lawyer and conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell.

The Guardian has reported extensively on that meeting, where Powell urged Trump to sign an executive order to seize voting machines and suspend normal law, based on Trumps executive order 13848, and to appoint her special counsel to investigate election fraud.

Cheney confirmed the reporting by this newspaper and others, that the group discussed dramatic steps such as seizing voting machines, but also alluded to a potential discussion about somehow obstructing Bidens election win certification.

The basis for that characterization, based on how Cheney described the late-night meeting in the Oval Office that later continued in the White House residence, appears to be how Trump, just hours later, tweeted that there would be a wild protest on January 6.

It was not clear whether Cheney was laying the groundwork for the select committee to tie Trump into a conspiracy of some sort, claiming this represented two people entering an agreement and taking overt steps to accomplishing it the legal standard for conspiracy.

But the wild protest phrase would shortly after be seized upon by some of the most prominent far-right political operatives.

Hours after Trumps tweet, according to archived versions of its website, Stop the Steal changed its banner to advertise a wild protest before Ali Alexander, who led the movement, even applied for a permit to stage a rally on the east side of the Capitol on January 6.

Original post:
Capitol attack pardon revelations could spell doom for Trump and allies - The Guardian US

Modern U.S. presidents such as Barack Obama and Ronald Reagan rank near the top of the best leaders in American history, while Donald Trump is closer to the bottom, according to the latest survey of presidential historians.

The five highest rated presidents, according to the C-SPAN survey, are Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. The bottom five include William Henry Harrison, Donald Trump, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan.

What the presidents at the very top of the list have in common is that most faced monumental challenges related to the nations survival. Lincoln presided over the Civil War and kept the country from breaking apart. Washington, Americas first president, helped nurture the budding democracy by not becoming king and stepping down after serving as president. Franklin Roosevelt presided over America during World War II and Eisenhower negotiated an end to the Korean War.

They were all president during critical periods in American history, says Cassandra Newby-Alexander, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and a professor of history at Norfolk State University, who took part in the survey. And all of them, from John F. Kennedy (8th), all the way up to Abraham Lincoln (1st) created some idealized vision of America.

The presidents were judged on the vision they had for America, public persuasion, crisis leadership, economics, moral authority, foreign affairs, administrative skills, relationship with Congress, pursuit of equal justice and their performance within the context of the time they led the country.

Political scientist Robert Kaufman, a professor of public policy at Pepperdine University, who also took part in the survey, says it is important to make a distinction between greatness and an effective president.

Not all very effective presidents can be great, in my estimation, because greatness also depends upon the magnitude of the challenge, he says. Theodore Roosevelt, at the beginning of the 20th century, and Bill Clinton, at the end, were effective, but never faced the type of challenge that would lend itself to greatness.

The man at the bottom of the list, James Buchanan, is often ranked as one of the worst U.S. presidents. His refusal to take a side on slavery, while at times siding with slaveholders, is thought to have inflamed divisions within the country ahead of the Civil War.

Both Kaufman, who calls himself a Republican, and Newby-Alexander feel Truman (6th) might be the most under-rated president. Both point to his fight for civil rights while Kaufman also praises the 33rd president for laying the successful architecture for winning the Cold War.

Overall, Newby-Alexander says, the survey results reflect a conventional view.

If you consider the average age of historians, they tend to be older, they tend to be white and they tend to be male, so that actually leads to many of them having a somewhat traditionalist perspective, she says, pointing out how high Theodore Roosevelt (4th) and Woodrow Wilson (13th) ranked despite their well-established racist views and actions.

Under their administrations, we had the largest number of concentrated lynchings that went unpunished than any other time in American history, she says. [Wilsons] the one who strictly segregated the federal government. That did not exist before. He segregated the Navy. That did not exist before. He initiated a lot of very retrograde policy during a critical period in American history.

The passage of time and the gaining of perspective tends to change how presidents are viewed. While Newby-Alexander thinks Reagan (9th) is overrated, specifically mentioning his stance on apartheid he vetoed the Comprehensive Apartheid Act, which levied economic sanctions against South Africa in 1986 Kaufman lists the reasons he would push the 40th U.S. president higher up the list.

Winning the Cold War, restoring American economic prosperity rooted in Judeo-Christian values, and optimism about America's exceptionalism, Kaufman says. He understood a) what the Soviet threat was about, b) what we needed to do to defeat it, and he left Bill Clinton a very strong hand. In many ways, we've been living off borrowed military capital of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s, when he inherited a military in disarray.

And, although he says it might be an unpopular opinion, Kaufman thinks Trump (now ranked 41 out of 44 presidents) will also rise in future surveys.

I think that, as the years go by, the president will get credit, however sausage-like the process was, for putting certain issues on the table that had long been neglected sovereignty, particularly China, and energy independence, he says. I think China, which is the dominant foreign policy threat of our time, by my estimate, is something where Trump will get more credit, substantively, not temperamentally, than one would rate him now in the wreckage of his presidency.

Newby-Alexander believes history will judge Obama (10th) more favorably.

I would have put Barack Obama under Abraham Lincoln because he managed to not only provide us with an incredibly important health care initiative while it has a lot of flaws, it was something that presidents have been trying to do for almost 100 years, and he succeeded, she says. Also, he was someone who got us out of a crisis that was actually deeper than the Great Depression when the stock market crashed in 1929. What we experienced right before he took office was worse than what Franklin Roosevelt dealt with, and he was able to pull us out. And I think that that has been tremendously underrated.

The current president, Joe Biden, is not on the list, and historians say it is too early to judge him.

Read this article:
America's Best and Worst Presidents Ranked - Voice of America - VOA News

GANG member Eric Holder was accused of shooting rapper Nipsey Hussle dead on March 31 2019.

But who is Eric holder and why has he been accused of gunning the singer down in cold blood?

1

Eric Holder was a member of the same gang as Nipsey Hussle. He has been accused of killing Nipsey.

They were both part of the gang known as the Rollin 60s and were both aspiring rappers.

Asghedom, who went by the name Nipsey Hussle, became a hip-hop star, neighborhood legend and local hero, while Holders music never caught on.

He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted.

Holder is due to face a jury on January 5th, 2022, and his lawyer, Deputy Public DefenderAaron Jansen, toldRolling Stone: Hes nervous, but he knows its time to get the case moving to trial.

According to prosecutors, Holder showed up "unannounced" to Nipsey's clothing store 'Marathon' in Los Angeles.

The two exchanged words, which "had something to do with Mr Asghedom (Nipsey) accusing Mr Holder of snitching.

Mr Holder reportedly left and then returned with a firearm. He has been accused of approaching Nipsey in the parking lot of the shop.

CCTV shows Holder appearing to fire several shots at Nipsey.

Jansen says Holder was experiencing a substantial mental health issue and was off his medication the day of the shooting.

Nipsey, whose real name is Ermias Joseph Asghedom, accused Holder of being a "snitch", which could be the reason that Holder gunned down Nipsey, according to a LA gang member.

"[Calling someone a snitch] is the worst thing you can say," says Cedric, a long-term member of a local gang. "That's a very bad statement.

"I'm killing you if you call me a snitch."

The L.A. County District Attorney charged Holder with 4 crimes, including premeditated murder.

At the time of his death, Nipsey was working on several civic development projects in a bid to revitalize his Los Angeles neighborhood.

Holder reportedly claimed he was paid to kill Nipsey, according to unconfirmed reports, as a result of these projects.

He was allegedly offered $75,000 and was told he would not be charged.

Holder was arrested two days after the fatal shooting outside of the LA store owned by Nipsey.

He is currently in jail awaiting trial after pleading not guilty.

The high-profile case was repeatedly delayed by the COVID pandemic and issues caused by the elevation of Holders prior lawyer to a judgeship.

The court date has been rescheduled for January 5.

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Who is Eric Holder and why did he kill Nipsey Hussle? - The Sun