Emails from his chief of staff and phone messages from his collaborators link the White House with the insurrection
After accumulating a mountain of evidence linking the Trump White House to the Jan.6 takeover of the Capitol, the House committee investigating the insurrection seems more determined than ever to unravel the political plot that was behind it.
Three months after the first witness subpoenas, the committee has assembled more than 30,000 files and is preparing to question more than 300 witnesses who would help identify the main actors in the plot. He announced this week that the thousands of personal documents released by former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows reveal much more direct involvement by the White House than previously known in overturning the 2020 election.
With Tuesday’s contempt resolution, the former North Carolina representative becomes the first former congressman to be convicted by his former colleagues since Sam Houston suffered the same fate in 1832. According to reasons given by his attorney, Meadows abruptly ended to their agreement of cooperation when they learned that the committee had begun to requisition the telephone records of those days to obtain the details of their calls. With them have been known dozens of frantic text messages sent to the former chief of staff by Republicans in Congress in the days before the attack on the Capitol and on January 6 itself. Among them were those of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., and the main presenters of Fox News urging him to force the president to stop the violent mob.
Phone records
In recent months the committee has issued orders to request the records of the calls of several hundred phone numbers that reveal the content, date, time, duration and destination numbers. This traces a clearer pattern of movements and communications between the main actors in the conspiracy.
In any case, despite the serious revelations of the package of more than 6,000 documents and communications delivered by Meadows, there is still no evidence to incriminate Trump. They could be drawn from the statements of other top advisers in his circle, including Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official who in the days before the attack voluntarily cooperated to change the outcome of the elections. Clark flattered Trump’s ears with a crude plan to declare the Georgia state results null.
Trump had fired then-Secretary of Justice Bill Barr, who refused to cooperate, and pressured interim Jeffrey Rosen to instrumentalize the department to initiate a legal cause that would invalidate the elections under the excuse of alleged irregularities in the states he lost.
Following Rosen’s resistance to crossing the constitutional line, Trump suggested appointing Clark Secretary of Justice, which led Rosen and the department’s top executives into a ‘riot’ with the threat of a massive resignation, a threat that ultimately stopped the president. . Although Clark has indicated that he could invoke the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination, the committee is hopeful of obtaining relevant information from his testimony.
Additionally, investigators believe they will soon access the hundreds of Trump White House documents that currently reside in the National Archives, classified under executive privilege. A ruling by the federal appeals court in Washington made this possible last week, dealing a severe blow to the former president’s legal team.
Either way, Republicans are confident that the 2022 legislatures will put an end to the fragile Democratic majority in the House of Representatives and thus annul the investigation.
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