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The public deserves a chance to know what its president was doing in a pivotal moment.
The odds that they will get their way are effectively zero. Trump will surely fight the subpoena, just as many of his associates have resisted the committee’s demands. One of them, Steve Bannon, was even convicted for contempt of Congress. Whether or not the committee could compel Trump’s testimony in the abstract—and the legal and constitutional questions are complicated—doing so requires time that the committee likely doesn’t have. If Republicans retake the House in the midterm elections, the liquidation (or appropriation) of the committee will be one of their first orders of business.
But what is likely to happen, and what is legally enforceable, are not the same as what is right. The American people deserve to hear from Trump.
Much of today’s hearing was a summary of what the panel has laid out in previous sessions, arranged to make the case that Trump had a premeditated plan to contest the election and declare victory, no matter the results; that he knew he had lost and claimed victory anyway; that he lied in claiming election fraud; that he had a role in putting together the violent mob that assembled in Washington on January 6; and that he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol in full awareness that they were armed and would do harm.
Whether or not it would be sufficient to convict Trump in a court of law, where prosecutors would have to prove his mental state, the case the committee put together was persuasive by any commonsense standard. Members showed documents and played tapes of Trump advisers explaining the plan to declare victory ahead of time—and then, having established their foreknowledge of the gambit, showed their foreknowledge of the January 6 violence, too, insinuating that Trump was in on it as well. The committee also offered testimony from aides who said they heard Trump admit, privately, that he had lost the election.
Proving what someone knew or thought is much harder than proving what they did. Trump’s most slavish defenders have insisted the election really was stolen, but his slightly more honest ones (or those more capable of shame) have argued that even if Trump should have known that the election was not stolen, or should have known the January 6 would turn violent, or should have seen he needed to call the mob off, he didn’t. (It doesn’t say much for Trump that the best defense of his behavior is that he was completely alienated from reality.)
The committee has unearthed an impressive amount of evidence about the paperwork coup before January 6 and about the planning and execution of the insurrection itself—far more than many observers, including me, expected. But some facts remain out of reach. Vice Chair Liz Cheney said that more than 30 people invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the committee. Others, such as former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, offered insightful testimony on many topics but refused to disclose conversations with Trump because of executive-privilege claims.
All of this is why the nation must hear from Trump himself. He is the one person best equipped to know what he planned before the election, what he was doing on January 6, and what he was thinking and feeling at the time. Although it is true that Trump is not always self-aware, and plain that he is exceptionally dishonest in his public statements, his language in sworn testimony is surprisingly honest and blunt, as I reported in 2018.
Two main, competing narratives have emerged about January 6. One was advanced by the committee today: Trump tried to subvert the election through rhetoric and litigation, and when that failed, he tried to subvert it through force. Trump tells another story, which is that the election really was stolen, that his phone call asking Georgia’s secretary of state to find 11,000 votes for him was “absolutely PERFECT,” and that the “Unselect Committee,” as he calls it, is perpetrating a massive hoax.
If that is true, then surely Trump should have no problem testifying. In fact, surely he must be eager to do so, in order to set the record straight, because, as he has argued, the committee is telling only its view of the story. He should want to testify under oath to bolster his credibility.
If Trump does fight the subpoena, or if he were to invoke his own Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, the implication would be clear for the public to see. The Fifth Amendment right is just that: a baseline constitutional right. A criminal defendant’s decision to invoke it is not admissible as evidence of guilt. But this is not a criminal proceeding. It is a political one, in every sense, and it is a matter of great importance for the safety of American democracy. The public deserves a chance to know what its president was doing in a pivotal moment and to make up its own mind about a political leader outside the artificial environment of a courtroom.
If Trump is too cowardly to tell the public, under oath, what really happened on January 6, that will be the clearest testimony the committee gathers to prove its theory.
Reps. Bennie Thompson (right) and Liz Cheney, joined by fellow committee members, speak to the media after a July 27 hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Chip Comodevilla/Getty)
The committee expressed it had ‘no doubt’ the ex-president led the effort to overturn the election
The House of Representatives select committee investigating last year’s riot voted unanimously on Thursday to subpoena Trump for testimony and documents in what may prove a mostly symbolic gesture, given time constraints and his likely legal resistance.
“We have left no doubt – none – that Donald Trump led an effort to upend American democracy that directly resulted in the violence of January 6,” said Bennie Thompson, chair of the committee, watched by police officers who defended the Capitol that day.
“He tried to take away the voice of the American people in choosing their president and replace the will of the voters with his will to remain in power. He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6. So we want to hear from him.”
Although some members of Trump’s inner circle, including his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner, have testified to the committee, the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and four fellow Republicans have ignored subpoenas. The panel is set to dissolve soon after next month’s midterm elections if Republicans gain control of the House.
Trump responded to the subpoena via his Truth Social platform but did not say whether he would comply. “Why didn’t the Unselect Committee ask me to testify months ago?” he wrote. “Why did they wait until the very end, the final moments of their last meeting? Because the Committee is a total ‘BUST’.”
The select committee has been investigating the attack on the Capitol for more than a year, interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses. It surpassed many observers’ expectations over the summer with a series of hearings that, polls suggest, convinced some Republicans that Trump bears some responsibility for the riot.
On Thursday, at its ninth and possibly final hearing, the panel sought to reclaim the spotlight less than a month before congressional midterm elections in which hundreds of Republicans who back Trump’s false claim of election fraud are running for office.
It presented devastating witness testimony that put Trump at the heart of a premeditated coup attempt and violent assault on American democracy.
Liz Cheney, the vice-chair of the committee, said in an opening statement: “The vast weight of evidence presented so far has shown us that the central cause of January 6 was one man, Donald Trump, who many others followed. None of this would have happened without him. He was personally and substantially involved in all of it.
“Exactly how did one man cause all of this? Today, we will focus on President Trump’s state of mind, his intent, his motivations, and how he spurred others to do his bidding, and how another January 6 could happen again if we do not take necessary action to prevent it.”
The argument echoed earlier hearings which maintained a tight focus on Trump as the singular architect of the insurrection, albeit with the help of aides and enablers, white nationalist extremists and a mob of supporters ready to follow his lead.
Cheney – nearing the end of her tenure in Congress after losing a Republican primary race in Wyoming – noted that the committee may ultimately decide to make criminal referrals to the justice department.
Leaving no doubt about Trump’s culpability, she added: “Claims that President Trump actually thought the election was stolen are not supported by fact and are not a defense. There is no defense that Donald Trump was duped or irrational. No president can defy the rule of law and act this way in a republic, period.”
Unlike past hearings, there was no live witness testimony but, one by one, committee members presented video evidence from witnesses – some of whom had not been seen at its earlier hearings – and information from nearly a million emails, documents and recordings obtained from the Secret Service.
Zoe Lofgren, a Democratic congresswoman and member of the panel, argued that Trump planned well in advance to declare victory even before all the ballots had been counted.
She said: “We now know more about President Trump’s intention for election night. The evidence shows that his false victory speech was planned well in advance before any votes had been counted. It was a premeditated plan by the president to declare victory no matter what the actual result was. He made a plan to stay in office before election day.”
It emerged that on 31 October 2020, the conservative activist Tom Fitton sent an email to Trump aides Molly Michael and Dan Scavino, providing a draft statement for Trump to declare victory before mail-in ballots had been counted. It stated: “We had an election today – and I won.”
At around 2.30am on 4 November 2020, in the east room of the White House, Trump held a celebratory event in which he declared: “Frankly, we did win this election.”
Video evidence showed that Brad Parscale, a former Trump campaign manager, testified to the panel that, as early as July, Trump had planned to declare victory in the 2020 election even if he lost.
The committee recently obtained footage of Roger Stone, a political consultant and self-proclaimed dirty trickster who worked for Richard Nixon, from a Danish film crew that followed Stone before and after the election for a documentary entitled A Storm Foretold.
A clip from 2 November showed Stone commenting: “I said, fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” Although it does not have all relevant records of Stone’s communications, the panel said, even Stone’s own social media posts acknowledge that he spoke with Trump on 27 December – as preparations for January 6 were under way.
Lofgren pointed out that Stone was in close contact with two rightwing groups, the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, that had numerous members attack Capitol police officers. Secret Service records showed that agents received tips ahead of January 6 that the Proud Boys planned to march armed into Washington.
Congressman Adam Kinzinger, a Republican, told the hearing: “A newly obtained secret service message from that day shows how angry President Trump was about the outcome. ‘Just fyi. POTUS is pissed – breaking news – Supreme Court denied his law suit. He is livid now.’”
White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide to then chief of staff Mark Meadows, recalled Trump as being “livid” and “fired up” about the court’s ruling. Trump told Meadows “something to the effect of: ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out,’” Hutchinson told the panel in a recorded interview.
The hearing also saw vivid film of Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and other Democratic leaders at a secure location in the Capitol. Schumer was seen urging Jeffrey Rosen, the acting attorney general, to tell Trump to call off the rioters.
Trump and his supporters – including many Republicans on Capitol Hill – have dismissed the January 6 panel as a political witch-hunt, but the panel’s backers say it is a necessary investigation into a violent threat against democracy.
But Thompson started Thursday’s hearing by making the case that its work is not politically motivated, but rather a bipartisan attempt to get to the bottom of an assault on America’s democracy.
“Over the course of these hearings, the evidence has proven that there was a multi-part plan led by former president Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election,” the Mississippi congressman said. “When you look back at what has come out through this committee’s work the most striking fact is that all this evidence has come almost entirely from Republicans.”
Trump, a businessman and former reality TV star denies wrongdoing, repeatedly hinting he will run for the White House again in 2024. He regularly holds campaign rallies where he continues to push his “big lie” falsely that he lost because of widespread fraud.
The attack on the Capitol injured more than 140 police officers and led to several deaths. More than 880 people have been arrested in connection with the riot, with more than 400 guilty pleas so far.
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Former president Trump made a desperation play earlier this month to keep the Justice Department from reviewing confidential documents. (photo: Getty)
The former president made a desperation play earlier this month to keep the Justice Department from reviewing confidential documents
“The application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on September 21, 2022, presented to Justice Thomas and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the filing read.
The ruling rejects an emergency request, filed by Trump’s legal team earlier this month, arguing that the 11th Circuit Court lacked authority to reverse a restraining order barring the DOJ from reviewing classified documents recovered from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in an August raid by the FBI.
Trump has made various attempts to prevent the DOJ from accessing the trove of documents, including demanding the appointment of a “special master” to review the recovered documents and arbitrate claims of executive and attorney privilege. Judge Raymond Dearie, whom a Trump-appointed judge selected for the role, took a torch to the former president’s claims that his retention of the documents was lawful because he had covertly declassified them before leaving office. “If the government gives me prima facia evidence that they are classified documents,” Dearie said, “and you don’t advance any claim of declassification, I’m left with a prima facia case of classified documents,” Dearie said, “and as far as I’m concerned, that’s the end of it.”
Nevertheless, Trump hoped the Supreme Court would allow Dearie to renewed access to a trove of classified documents that the 11th Circuit Court ruled the DOJ could review.
Trump, of course, appointed three of the nine justices on the court, which is now dominated by conservatives.
A woman hugs her daughter in front of a destroyed school in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk Oblast, Oct. 13, 2022. (photo: Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP)
ALSO SEE: Civilians in 'Annexed' Kherson Start to Flee to Russia
Amid Ukrainian Advances
Russian-led militants now call for an evacuation from the occupied territory. The call comes as Ukrainian forces advance toward occupied Kherson.
Moscow officially admitted the death of conscripted soldiers deployed to Ukraine after Russian President Vladimir Putin called for mobilization.
According to Russia's regional authorities, five soldiers from Chelyabinsk Oblast were killed in Ukraine. All of them were conscripted after Sept. 21.
The Russian public's support for the war is declining, Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar said on Telegram.
"Putin's regime is increasingly aware of the futility of plans to hold on to the captured Ukrainian territories," Maliar said on Oct. 13.
Battlefield development
Russian forces strengthen defenses in "the newly occupied territories," Southern Operational Command reported.
Russian forces also increased fire in multiple directions across Donetsk Oblast, including Kramatorsk, Avdiivka, Siversk, and Bakhmut.
Russian-led proxies claimed on Telegram that they captured the villages of Opytne and Ivanhrad, located south of Bakhmut. This is the first Russian success in months.
Kharkiv Oblast spokeswoman said about 51 settlements are left under Russian control. Kharkiv Oblast has been the site of Ukraine's successful counteroffensive, which liberated nearly the entire region.
Meanwhile, Ukraine's General Staff reported that Russia had ordered a halt to its offensive in Donetsk Oblast. Due to "extremely low morale and psychological condition of the recruits," General Staff said.
Gas threats
At a meeting in Kazakhstan, Putin said Turkey is the most reliable route to transport gas to the EU.
Back in Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky warned that Russia could intentionally strike Ukraine's gas transit system to demand the launch of Nord Stream 2, scraped days before Russia launched its all-out war against Ukraine.
In an interview with German television broadcaster ZDF, Zelensky said such attacks could happen within two months.
Casualties and attacks
Russian forces launched a missile strike and 15 airstrikes across Ukraine on Oct. 13, according to Ukraine's General Staff.
Ukraine is now downing between 85-90% of Iranian-made Shahed-136 drones, said Oleksiy Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
Over 130 bodies were exhumed from mass burial sites in Donetsk Oblast. More bodies are being found across recently liberated territories as of Oct. 13, said Oleksandra Havryliuk, Donetsk Oblast police spokeswoman.
In the front line city of Avdiivka, city head Vitalii Barabash said that all residential buildings suffered damages due to Russian shelling.
A Russian missile strike destroyed a five-story building in Mykolaiv Oblast, killing at least five people. Governor Vitaly Kim said there might be more bodies under the rubble.
"Ukraine only has 10% of the air defense it needs," President Volodymyr Zelensky said during his address to the Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe assembly on Oct. 13.
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A demonstrator waves a flag with marijuana leaves depicted on it during a protest calling for the legalization of marijuana, outside of the White House, April 2, 2016. (photo: Luis Magana/AP)
President Biden recently requested leniency for low-level marijuana offenders. The Republican governors who rejected that call are also getting big donations from private prison corporations.
Last Thursday, Joe Biden said he is “calling on governors to pardon simple state marijuana possession offenses.” In response, Republican governors Greg Abbott (TX), Bill Lee (TN), and Asa Hutchinson (AR) issued statements brushing off the request.
Those three governors have raked in more than $263,000 from donors linked to the private prison industry, which profits off tough-on-crime policies and incarceration. In all, the private prison industry has funneled more than $1 million into state elections in the last four years, mostly to Republicans.
Additionally, since 2020, two private prison giants alone — CoreCivic and the GEO Group — have dumped more than $1.7 million into the Republican Governors Association, which bankrolls GOP gubernatorial campaigns across the country. Meanwhile, the industry has spent more than $8.5 million on state lobbying in the last three years.
The dynamic hints at the next obstacle in efforts to reform the nation’s drug laws. As more state lawmakers face pressure to decriminalize or legalize marijuana, the prison industry, backed by campaign donations, could intensify its efforts to preserve drug-war policies that maintain current incarceration rates — and its profits.
The industry openly admits the connection between such policies and its revenues. For instance: CoreCivic’s most recent annual report notes that the company’s profits rely on harsh drug laws.
“The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, the expansion of alternatives to incarceration and detention, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws,” says the report. “Any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional or detention facilities to house them.”
A large share of private prison industry donations have flowed to Republicans in Florida, where the GEO Group is based and where it has been awarded state contracts.
The industry has donated more than $1 million to Florida Republican Party committees, and another $269,000 to Florida governor Ron DeSantis (R), who has not commented on Biden’s pardon request.
Not all Republicans are opposing Biden’s reforms. Representatives Dave Joyce (R-OH) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) both praised the move, with the latter telling Fox Business: “I don’t always agree with the Biden administration, I’ve been very vocal about that, but this is a step in the right direction.”
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-CT, called on the Biden administration Thursday to cut off sales of U.S. antimissile systems to Saudi Arabia and provide them instead to Ukraine. (photo: Getty)
“My contention is that Saudi Arabia has been an unreliable ally for a very long time, and that we give them much more than they give us,” Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in an interview for the Yahoo News “Skullduggery” podcast.
“So I think it’s time for us to seriously rethink our security relationship,” he added. “There are two really important antimissile systems that we provide to Saudi Arabia,” referencing the RAM and Patriot systems, both of which are made by Raytheon.
These systems “would be much better utilized inside Ukraine or inside NATO allies that are on Russia’s periphery,” Murphy said.
Murphy is among a number of leading U.S. senators who have called for cutting back military and other aid to the Saudis in the wake of last week’s agreement of the kingdom to join with Russia to cut back oil production, a move that is expected to lead to another spike in U.S. gas prices. President Biden said this week that “there will be consequences” for the Saudis but has so far declined to offer specifics.
But Murphy declined to criticize Biden for his trip last summer to Saudi Arabia, during which he fist-bumped Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite last year’s release of a U.S. intelligence report concluding that the de facto Saudi leader approved the operation that led to the brutal murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Oh, my God, I’m just so sick of talking about it,” Murphy replied, when asked if the fist bump with the crown prince was a mistake. “I mean, they were fist-bumping because of COVID protocols. They weren’t fist-bumping because they’re good buddies.
“I just think this is so overwrought,” he added. “The United States has a relationship with Saudi Arabia. The president of the United States should be able to talk to the crown prince. Frankly, I think the United States should be talking to our adversaries too. I think the United States should be talking to the Iranians. I think we should be in dialogue with the North Koreans. I think occasionally we should be talking with the Russians.”
Half of the world’s coral reefs are threatened by 2035 if nothing is done to mitigate the climate crisis.
That’s the alarming finding of a new study published in PLOS Biology Tuesday, which found that 50 percent of reefs could face “unsuitable” conditions in just 13 years.
“While the negative impacts of climate change on coral reefs are well known, this research shows that they are actually worse than anticipated due to a broad combination of climate change-induced stressors,” lead author and University of Hawaiʻi (UH) at Mānoa Department of Geography and Environment in the College of Social Sciences PhD student Renee O. Setter said in a press release. “It was surprising to find that so many global coral reefs would be overwhelmed by unsuitable environmental conditions so soon due to multiple stressors.”
The fact that coral reefs are in trouble is not news. The climate crisis is currently considered the greatest threat to the world’s reefs, and 14 percent of them were lost because of it between 2009 and 2018 alone. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, even limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius beyond pre-industrial levels would still see 70 to 90 percent of tropical reefs wiped out.
The new study builds on these earlier warnings by considering how multiple stressors might interact to harm a reef, instead of focusing on just one factor.
“We know that corals are vulnerable to increasing sea surface temperatures and marine heat waves due to climate change. But it is important to include the complete anthropogenic (environmental change caused or influenced by human activity) impact from numerous stressors that coral reefs are exposed to in order to get a better sense of the overall risks to these ecosystems,” study co-author and associate research professor at the Hawaiʻi Institute of Marine Biology in UH Manoa’s School of Ocean and Earth Sciences and Technology Erik Franklin said in the press release.
The five stressors the research team considered were
- Sea-surface temperature
- Ocean acidification
- Tropical storms
- Land use pressures
- Human population pressures
The research team was interested in when one or more of these pressures would generate unsuitable environmental conditions. This means that the reef ecosystem’s health would degrade considerably, but the species calling it home wouldn’t necessarily become locally or globally extinct. To find out, UH Manoa-based team ran different models based on different emissions scenarios considering the impacts of one or multiple stressors.
In a worst-case, business-as-usual emissions scenario, they found that just one stressor would push half of reefs into unsuitable conditions by 2050. However, if multiple stressors were considered, half of reefs would reach that point by 2035. For a best-case emissions reduction scenario, the difference was still stark. Looking at just one stressor would see 41 percent of reefs facing unsuitable conditions by 2100, but considering multiple would see 64 percent of reefs reach that point by the century’s end.
For the worst-case scenario, predictions were even more dire for the mid and end point of the century, with 99 percent of reefs facing unsuitable conditions due to at least one stressor by 2055 and 93 percent of reefs threatened by two or more stressors by 2100. All of this means that scientists and conservationists need to act faster to save the world’s coral reefs.
“Prior studies have indicated the projected dire effects of climate change on coral reefs by mid-century; by analyzing a multitude of projected disturbances, our study reveals a much more severe prognosis for the world’s coral reefs as they have significantly less time to adapt while highlighting the urgent need to tackle available solutions to human disturbances,” the study authors concluded in their abstract.
While the paper is global in scope, it also has important local consequences.
“This has great implications for our local Hawaiian reefs that are key to local biodiversity, island culture, fisheries and tourism,” Franklin said in the press release.
The team next hopes to study the impact of the climate crisis on individual coral species to determine which are more vulnerable.
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