AG nominee: 'The investigators will be investigated'

Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, faced questions on Capitol Hill Wednesday over her loyalty to the Republican president-elect, who has vowed to use the agency to pursue revenge on his perceived political enemies, reported The Associated Press.

The former Florida attorney general and corporate lobbyist told lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee that politics would play no part in her decision-making as the country’s chief federal law enforcement officer, but also refused to rule out the potential for investigations into Trump’s adversaries.

If confirmed to lead the department that charged the once and future president in two separate criminal cases, Bondi would become one of the most closely scrutinized members of Trump’s cabinet.

She’s a close Trump ally and long-time defender

Bondi has been a fixture in Trump’s orbit for years, and a regular defender of the president-elect on news programs amid his legal woes.

“The Department of Justice, the prosecutors will be prosecuted — the bad ones,” Bondi said in a 2023 Fox News appearance. “The investigators will be investigated.”

As Democrats repeatedly questioned Wednesday whether she would maintain a Justice Department that’s independent from the White House, Bondi insisted that “no one should be prosecuted for political purposes.” But she also refused to say what she would do if the president directed her to drop a case or answer whether she would investigate Jack Smith, the Justice Department special counsel who charged Trump.

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Creators: Rewriting History on the Anniversary of the Jan. 6 Insurrection

Matthew T. Mangino
Creators
January 6, 2025

Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-Ga.) recently released his "Interim Report on the Failures and Politicization of the January 6th Select Committee." As the title suggests, the report seeks to rewrite what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when insurrectionists, encouraged by then-President and current President-elect Donald Trump, attacked the U.S. Capitol.

It seems fitting that Loudermilk should be from the state of Georgia. He wants to do to Jan. 6 what his Southern forefathers did in the decades following the Civil War. He wants to rewrite history.

The South was vanquished after the Civil War. The Confederates could not deal with massive and total defeat. As Ty Seidule wrote in "Robert E. Lee and Me," a new narrative had to be created to explain their failure. Seidule explained, "Today, historians call the series of lies, half-truths, and exaggerations the 'Lost Cause of the Confederacy' myth."

Loudermilk's report includes lies, half-truths, exaggerations and omissions. As historian and writer Heather Cox Richardson recently wrote, quoting former Rep. Liz Cheney, Loudermilk's report "intentionally disregards the truth and the Select Committee's tremendous weight of evidence, and instead fabricates lies and defamatory allegations in an attempt to cover up what Donald Trump did." Cheney continued, "Their allegations do not reflect a review of the actual evidence, and are a malicious and cowardly assault on the truth."

The Lost Cause was not just a passing effort to rewrite history. Seventy-one years after the war, Loudermilk's fellow Georgian Margaret Mitchell wrote "Gone with the Wind," a playbook for the Lost Cause. Made into an Academy Award-winning movie, "Gone with the Wind" sanitized the reasons for the war, shaping perceptions of the Civil War for generations.

The FBI classified the Jan. 6 attack as an act of domestic terrorism that injured approximately 140 police officers and endangered the country's peaceful transfer of power. According to NPR, in the immediate aftermath, a bipartisan group of political leaders condemned the violence. "American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of domestic business they did not like, "said Sen. Mitch McConnell, the top Republican in the Senate at the time.

The attempted coup was not a spontaneous act, according to American Oversight. "The invasion of the U.S. Capitol ... was stoked in plain sight." ProPublica reported that Trump supporters had discussed openly for weeks their plans for a violent overthrow. Their goal of stopping the election certification was based on unfounded conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud.

Trump has rejected those arguments and is complicit in attempting to rewrite the history of the insurrection. He refers to Jan. 6 as a "day of love" and calls the rioters "patriots." He announced his intention to pardon those charged and convicted in connection with the attack — that will be a lot of pardons.

Nearly 1,000 Jan. 6 offenders pleaded guilty; more than 250 were convicted in court. The historical record established by the vast, nationwide legal effort cannot just be erased by a wholesale pardon. The endless video clips — logged and verified — and the volumes of court records have helped prosecutors turn Jan. 6 into the best-documented riot in history.

Seidule wrote, "[T]he Lost Cause became a movement, an ideology, a myth, even a civil religion." He went on to write, "This lie came at a horrible, deadly, impossible cost to the nation, a cost we are still paying today. The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws."

Loudermilk seeks to do the same with Jan. 6. As America marks the fourth anniversary of Jan. 6, we would do well to remember that Loudermilk's flawed and misleading report and demand that Liz Cheney be prosecuted for her work on the investigating committee is ripped from the playbook of the postbellum South.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book "The Executioner's Toll, 2010" was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on X @MatthewTMangino

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Are we numb to the threats to democracy?

Dahlia Lithwick writing for Slate:

It’s been just a clutch of days since former President Donald Trump and his allies made clear that if he wins reelection, he plans to gut the existing U.S. government and “install a pre-vetted, pro-Trump army of up to 54,000 loyalists” to take over senior legal, judicial, defense, regulatory, and domestic policy jobs in the civil service. It’s been under a week since he announced in an interview on Univision that he’d cheerfully “weaponize” the power of the Justice Department to indict his rivals for no other reason than that they were “beating me very badly.” Also less than a week ago, he delivered his chilling Veterans Day promise to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, lie, steal, and cheat on elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America and the American dream.” The news of his plans to carry out mass deportations while rounding up millions of undocumented immigrants and interning them in sprawling detention camps, as well as his hope to cancel U.S. visas—for lawful green-card and student visa holders—who harbor “anti-American” views is also very recent. All of this is to be achieved by installing armies of lawyers, judges, and functionaries who will not erect roadblocks to such projects, as they did when he was president the first time, because they don’t believe in the rule of law as we understand it. As Trump openly described his rationale for his plans last week in the most spine-chilling language yet, undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” And yes, the week is only half done.

We further learned, just a week ago, that Ohio Republicans plan to try to block a constitutional amendment protecting reproductive freedom by stripping state judges of the power to decide such cases. And we have learned in recent days of plans by allies of the new Republican House speaker to reinstate the brutally repressive Comstock Act so as to further limit sexual autonomy. And today we can’t seem to take our eyes off the now-violent physical altercations happening in the very same Capitol building that was stormed by violent extremists trying to overturn the 2020 election. The cogs and the wheels of democratic governance sound janky as hell right now.

The piece suggesting that all of the above represents an objective, verifiable, and historically predictive set of preconditions for authoritarianism, or fascism, or the end of free and fair elections has been said or written, succinctly and brilliantly, in recent days by Jamelle Bouie, Joyce Vance, Ruth Ben Ghiat, Rachel Maddow, John Cassidy, Seth Meyers, Jason Stanley, Zack Beauchamp, Chris Lehmann, Michael Tomasky, Scott Lehigh, and who knows how many others. And, perhaps paradoxically, the piece suggesting that the press has failed utterly to meet this perilous moment has been done, also brilliantly, by Margaret Sullivan, Brian Stelter, and Dan Froomkin, all of them echoing the call of New York University professor Jay Rosen, who continues to demand that the media cover the 2024 campaign by emphasizing “not the odds but the stakes.”

The stakes, we can probably agree, are in no way in doubt. As Bouie and others suggest, the Stephen Millers and Jeffrey Clarks and Steve Bannons are counting the minutes before “Flood the Zone With Shit” becomes the new “E Pluribus Unum.” Indeed, it almost seems as if “not the odds but the stakes” no longer captures a media failure alone; it actually also encapsulates the scope of a bitter political failure. We may actually have moved into the realm of journalism adequately covering the stakes, with the sad reality emerging that nobody seems to care much about the stakes at the present moment.

The horse race we are describing? The odds we are clocking? The contest we are all betting on? It’s now just fascism vs. democracy. These “stakes” we are, all of us, fretting about, this question of whether democracy survives the next 12 months, is the very thing everyone is watching like it’s the NCAA playoffs. I’m no longer completely convinced that voters don’t fully understand the stakes; not when you’re hearing Trump talking of executing his former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley, not when you’re hearing of mass deportations without due process, and not when family separations at the border is a future promise, as opposed to a recent lawless tragedy.

What if the media is actually covering the spectacle precisely because the stakes—casual brutality, violence, callousness, lawlessness, and the descent into anarchy—are perfectly visible, legible, and clear? It’s hard to read any other way the current threats by sitting senators who promise to beat up committee witnesses, or former speakers of the House who elbow their political opponents, or congresspeople who say they will impeach everyone who makes them mad while dabbling in the recreational threat to shut down the government. What if the problem isn’t that consumers of media fail to understand the actual stakes of losing democracy? What if the problem is really that watching this MMA smackdown between fascism and representative democracy is, in fact, the 2023 version of good, clean fun? As Bouie puts it in his New York Times piece on the subject this week, “The mundane truth of American politics is that much of what we want to know is in plain view. You don’t have to search hard or seek it out; you just have to listen. And Donald Trump is telling us, loud and clear, that he wants to end American democracy as we know it.”

There is going to come a moment—and for many of the writers cited above, that moment has already arrived—in which the media appropriately reports on the enormity of the stakes and nobody flinches.

When you’ve been contending with such enormous stakes for as long as this country has—since at least that golden escalator ride eight years ago—it can be hard to keep flinching at the risks, even as they become ever more undeniable. Here’s hoping that our reflexes start to kick in over the next 12 months, lest we’re once again reminded of what happens when the stakes have been staring us in the face all along and we choose instead to roll the dice on democracy itself.

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Jan. 6 defendants being treated more leniently than similar defendants

The vast majority of Jan. 6 defendants have been released on bail while awaiting trial, however, and their pretrial detention rate is significantly lower than the rate for the total population of federal defendants, reported The New York Times.

The suggestions by Gov. DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy that Jan. 6 rioters and conspirators were being punished more harshly than people who participated in Black Lives Matter protests align with Republicans’ broader grievances that the federal justice system has been “weaponized” against conservatives.

But most of the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, when the movement reached a peak, were peaceful. An Associated Press investigation in 2021 found that, in the cases where they did turn violent, more than 120 defendants had either pleaded guilty or been convicted on federal charges such as rioting, arson and conspiracy.

Those who had been sentenced at the time of the A.P. investigation had received prison terms of a little over two years on average. But of the more than 1,100 cases related to Jan. 6, according to an NPR database, the median sentence for those who received prison time has been 120 days.

In the cases of Mr. Tarrio and other Proud Boys leaders, the more serious charges of seditious conspiracy — and the harsher sentences — stemmed from their attempts to overturn a democratic election or prevent the government from carrying out essential business. Federal law defines seditious conspiracy as two or more people plotting to overthrow the federal government by force, to wage war against it, to seize federal property or to, by force, “prevent, hinder or delay the execution of any law of the United States.”

 “The Portland rioters’ conduct, while obviously serious, did not target a proceeding prescribed by the Constitution and established to ensure a peaceful transition of power,” Carl J. Nichols, a district court judge in Washington who was appointed by Mr. Trump, wrote in denying a motion from a Jan. 6 defendant who had claimed to be a victim of “selective prosecution.” “Nor did the Portland rioters, unlike those who assailed America’s Capitol in 2021, make it past the buildings’ outer defenses.”

The defendant, Judge Nichols wrote, “has failed to point to any Portland case that is similar to this one and in which the government made a substantially different prosecutorial decision.”

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Read the full January 6 Committee Report Summary

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol released a 154-page summary of its findings Monday, Courtesy of NBC News. The report is the culmination of nearly 18 months of work.

More classified documents found at Trump compound

A recent search of a Florida storage unit used by former President Donald Trump yielded two items designated as classified, two people familiar with the matter said Wednesday.

The sources declined to elaborate on the nature of the materials, which were retrieved from a West Palm Beach, Florida location, and turned over to federal authorities as part of a continuing investigation into Trump's retention of sensitive government records after he left office in 2021.

A search, which included other Trump properties, was conducted by an outside group assembled by the former president's lawyers after federal officials had expressed concern about the proper accounting for sensitive government records, reports The USA Today.

The recovery was first reported by the Washington Post, citing three searches for classified materials after Trump’s attorneys were pressed by a federal judge to attest that they had fully complied with a May grand jury subpoena to turn over all classified materials.

An August search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate resulted in the seizure of 11,000 government documents, including about 100 records designated as classified, escalating a criminal inquiry implicating the former president.

The documents investigation is one of several criminal inquiries now threatening Trump, who last month announced a new campaign to retake the White House.

Trump's announcement triggered the Justice Department's appointment of a special counsel to oversee the documents investigation and a separate inquiry into efforts to subvert the 2020 election.

Local prosecutors in Georgia are also pursuing a sprawling investigation involving Trump's interference in the 2020 election in that state, including attempts to pressure state officials to overturn President Joe Biden's election win.

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Justice Thomas' wife to testify before House Committee investigating Jan. 6 Capitol attack

Virginia Thomas, the wife of Justice Clarence Thomas and a conservative activist who pushed to overturn the 2020 election, has agreed to sit for an interview with the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, reported The New York Times.

The development could represent a breakthrough for the committee, which for months has sought to interview Ms. Thomas, who goes by Ginni, about her communications with a conservative lawyer in close contact with former President Donald J. Trump.

“I can confirm that Ginni Thomas has agreed to participate in a voluntary interview with the committee,” her lawyer, Mark Paoletta, said in a statement. “As she has said from the outset, Mrs. Thomas is eager to answer the committee’s questions to clear up any misconceptions about her work relating to the 2020 election. She looks forward to that opportunity.”

Her cooperation was reported earlier by CNN. A spokesman for the committee declined to comment.

The committee requested an interview with Ms. Thomas in June, after it emerged that she had exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, in which she urged on efforts to challenge Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the 2020 election. She also pressed lawmakers in several states to fight the results of the election.

But it was Ms. Thomas’s interactions with John Eastman, a conservative lawyer who pushed Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay the certification of Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021, that has most interested investigators.

“We are specifically investigating the activities of President Trump, John Eastman and others as they relate to the Constitution and certain other laws, including the Electoral Count Act, that set out the required process for the election and inauguration of the president,” the committee’s leaders — Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming — wrote to Ms. Thomas. “The select committee has obtained evidence that John Eastman worked to develop alternate slates of electors to stop the electoral count on Jan. 6.”

The panel obtained at least one email between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman after a federal judge ordered Mr. Eastman to turn over documents to the panel from the period after the November 2020 election when he was meeting with conservative groups to discuss fighting the election results.

That same judge has said it is “more likely than not” that Mr. Trump and Mr. Eastman committed two felonies as part of the effort, including conspiracy to defraud the American people.

Mr. Paoletta has argued that the communications between Ms. Thomas and Mr. Eastman contain little of value to the panel’s investigation.

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First elected official removed from office for Jan. 6 involvement

A New Mexico county commissioner became the first public official to lose their job for participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol when a state judge ruled that the Republican violated the U.S. Constitution by engaging in an insurrection, reported Reuters.

State District Court Judge Francis Mathew wrote in his decision that Otero County Commissioner Couy Griffin, founder of a group called "Cowboys for Trump," violated Section 3 of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution when he took part in the riot that left four people dead and 100 police officers injured, disqualifying him from holding local, state or federal office.

On Jan. 6, Griffin joined thousands of people at the Capitol. He breached security barriers outside of the building and eventually assumed a leadership role in the mob and egged on the violence, Mathew said in his ruling.

Griffin "incited, encouraged and helped normalize the violence," Mathew wrote. Griffin's actions were "overt acts in support of the insurrection."

Griffin is the first elected official to be removed from office for their involvement in the riot. The ruling also marks the first time a judge has ruled that the incident was an insurrection and the first time since 1869 that a judge has removed a public official under Section 3.

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Today's political violence comes from those 'who believe in nothing'

 Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic:

Civil war is among the many terms we now use too easily. The American Civil War was a bloodbath driven by the inevitable confrontation between the Union and the organized forces of sedition and slavery. But at least the Civil War, as I recently said on Morning Joe during a panel on political violence in America, was about something. Compared with the bizarre ideas and half-baked wackiness that now infest American political life, the arguments between the North and the South look like a deep treatise on government.

The United States now faces a different kind of violence, from people who believe in nothing—or at least, in nothing real. We do not risk the creation of organized armies and militias in Virginia or Louisiana or Alabama marching on federal institutions. Instead, all of us face random threats and unpredictable dangers from people among us who spend too much time watching television and plunging down internet rabbit holes. These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them.

Donald Trump is central to this fraying of public sanity, because he has done one thing for such people that no one else could do: He has made their lives interesting. He has made them feel important. He has taken their itching frustrations about the unfairness of life and created a morality play around them, and cast himself as the central character. Trump, to his supporters, is the avenging angel who is going to lay waste to the “elites,” the smarty-pantses and do-gooders, the godless and the smug, the satisfied and the comfortable.

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U.S. Capitol insurrectionist sentenced to seven years in prison

A federal judge sentenced Guy Wesley Reffitt, the first defendant to go on trial in the Justice Department’s sprawling criminal inquiry into the Jan. 6 attack, to more than seven years in prison, the longest sentence to date in a case stemming from the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, reported The New York Times.

After a six-hour hearing, Judge Dabney L. Friedrich handed down a sentence at the low end of the guideline range. She noted that was still significantly longer than any given so far to any of the more than 800 people arrested in connection with the riot, many of whom have struck plea bargains.

Prosecutors had asked that Mr. Reffitt be given 15 years after adding a sentencing enhancement used in cases of domestic terrorism. But Judge Friedrich rejected those terms, sentencing him to seven years and three months in prison with three years of probation, and ordering him to pay $2,000 in restitution and receive mental health treatment.

A jury found Mr. Reffitt guilty on five felony charges in March, including obstructing Congress’s certification of the 2020 presidential election, carrying a .40-caliber pistol during the riot and two counts of civil disorder. Unlike others who breached the building, Mr. Reffitt did not go inside.

The sentencing capped a trial that was seen as an important test for the Justice Department, which is only beginning the marathon process of trying what could be scores of rioters. In particular, prosecutors and defense lawyers had been watching to see how the obstruction charge, a rarely used count central to many of the cases yet to reach trial, would hold up in court.

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Seditious conspiracy is two or more people agreeing to “oppose by force” the government’s authority

Former assistant attorney general Harry Litman writes in the Los Angeles Times:

The criticism of the Department of Justice continues to grow: Detractors see the department as too far behind the Jan. 6 committee. They want to know why Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland and the Justice Department have yet to come forward with a serious criminal charge against Donald Trump.

These gloomy observations miss at least one crucial point: There is a gap in the committee’s development of the Jan. 6 evidence for the most serious yet fitting charge against Trump. And it seems likely that only the Justice Department can fill it.

First, remember that the Justice Department may be much further along than we know; its work initially is always largely opaque. And the department has also had its hands full dealing with hundreds of on-the-ground rioters, as well as investigating false elector schemes and other possible crimes connected to the 2020 election and committed by figures in the former president’s inner circle.

It’s also important to bear in mind the fundamentally different tasks of the department and the committee. The House hearings aim to present a general narrative of Team Trump’s attempt to undo President Biden’s victory, along with the facts to back it up. The Justice Department, on the other hand, needs to develop a legal case consisting of admissible evidence proving criminal guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and if possible beyond Republican cavil as well.

What crime exactly? Here’s another important difference between the department’s task and Congress’. The committee’s work has given rise to a sort of parlor game of “name that Trump crime” among commentators, everything from manslaughter to destruction of federal property. That won’t cut it for the Justice Department.

Even assuming that the department could prove any number of offenses on the part of Trump, Garland would not take the unprecedented step of prosecuting a former president unless the charge involved a grave crime against the U.S. Most likely, that charge would be seditious conspiracy. It’s the most serious of any leveled so far against those involved in the insurrection attempt, and for most Americans, it captures the fundamental evil that Trump has wrought.

In the federal criminal code, seditious conspiracy is defined, in part, as two or more people agreeing to “oppose by force” the government’s authority or agreeing “by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” It doesn’t matter if they succeed; the crime is in the agreement.

Since Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony in the June 28 hearing, Trump has looked to be a moving force, if not the moving force, in the deadly melee at the U.S. Capitol. Before we heard Hutchinson‘s descriptions of the president’s words and deeds leading up to the riots, we might have concluded that the source of the violence was confined to mob spontaneity and the machinations of domestic terrorists and militia leaders.

But no more. And yet, although with Hutchinson’s account, and that of other witnesses, the committee has presented ample, even voluminous, evidence of Trump’s role in the events of Jan. 6, to date it has produced only circumstantial evidence of the all-important element of an agreement between Trump and a co-conspirator.

The “will be wild” Trump tweet inviting his followers to Washington; Stephen K. Bannon’s declaration that “all hell” would “break loose” on Jan. 6; and Rudolph W. Giuliani’s statement to Hutchinson on Jan. 2 that Jan. 6 would be wild, seconded by White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, all speak to the likelihood but not the certainty that Trump conspired with one or more persons to “prevent, hinder or delay” Congress’ certification of the election.

It’s theoretically possible to prove a case of seditious conspiracy based on circumstantial evidence, but we can be sure that won’t be enough for the prosecution of a former president. Absent a major new revelation from the committee, we must rely on the Justice Department to supply the critical agreement element.

The traditional, and most effective, way for prosecutors to nail a charge against someone like Trump would be to leverage the cooperation of an alleged co-conspirator — in this case, a Giuliani, Bannon or Meadows, perhaps — with a promise of immunity. The department has that kind of power; a congressional committee does not.

Within its brief, the Jan. 6 House Select Committee has done a splendid job. It has given the country a fighting chance at having an official chronicle of the many schemes that together make up Trump’s sinister undertakings between the 2020 election and its certification in Congress.

But it will take more than a simple handoff of the committee’s findings to the Justice Department to set up a successful prosecution of Trump and his cronies.

The Justice Department’s critics are wrong to conclude that Garland’s work has been done for him in Congress, much less to upbraid him for not having already brought charges against the former president. Garland deserves the presumption that, as promised, he is going after insurrectionists “at all levels,” and that the department will do the heavy lifting to induce a loyalist to turn on the former president.

Unless and until Garland succeeds, Trump, by virtue of the committee’s outstanding work, may stand guilty in the public’s mind and in the judgment of history, but there’s no holding him criminally accountable in a court of law.

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