Another court filing by the January 6th Committee has revealed more devastating evidence against sitting GOP members of Congress and their role in participating in the conspiracy to overthrow the American government.
Republican members of Congress were heavily involved in calls and meetings with former President Donald Trump and his top aides as they devised a strategy to overturn the election in December 2020, according to new evidence filed in federal court late Friday.
Deposition excerpts filed by the Jan 6. select committee — part of an effort to force former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows to appear for an interview — suggest that some of Trump’s top allies in Congress were frequently present in meetings where a handful of strategies to prevent then-President-elect Joe Biden from taking office were discussed, including efforts to replace the leadership of the Justice Department with figures who would sow doubts about the legitimacy of the election.
Lawmakers who attended meetings, in person or by phone, included Reps. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), Louie Gohmert (R-Texas), Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and numerous members of the House Freedom Caucus, according to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Meadows who provided key testimony about the conversations and meetings Meadows had in December 2020.
The new evidence underscores the expansive cast of elected Republicans who had ultimately enlisted themselves in Trump’s last-ditch effort to cling to power. Members traded theories about ways to push then-Vice President Mike Pence to single-handedly stop Biden’s election, they parried with the White House Counsel’s Office on the boundaries of the law regarding presidential electors and they met directly with Pence’s staff to encourage him to take direct action on Jan. 6, when Congress convened to count electoral votes.
“They felt that he had the authority to — pardon me if my phrasing isn’t correct on this, but — send votes back to the States or the electors back to the States,” Hutchinson recalled.
The disclosure came as part of a Friday evening court filing by the select panel asking a federal court to throw out Meadows’ lawsuit against the committee. In the filing, the select committee revealed that Meadows turned over 2,319 text messages during a brief period of cooperation but withheld more than 1,000, citing various privileges.
“[H]e was not acting as anything like a typical White House Chief of Staff advising the President on official matters of government policy,” House General Counsel Doug Letter wrote. “Mr. Meadows was playing a campaign role, attempting to facilitate a strategy that would have reversed the certified results of the 2020 election.”
The committee indicated that Meadows told Jordan in a text message that he supported efforts to convince Pence to send the election back to the states.
“I have pushed for this. Not sure it is going to happen,” Meadows texted Jordan early in the morning on Jan. 6.
Some of the GOP lawmakers were present in December meetings, Hutchinson recalled, when members of the White House Counsel’s Office raised significant legal doubts about a plan for pro-Trump activists to submit “alternate” electors in states won by Joe Biden.
Others attended a Dec. 21 meeting where Rudy Giuliani, then the president’s personal lawyer, and some associates advocated a plan for Pence to unilaterally refuse to count Biden’s electors and instead send the election back to various GOP-controlled state legislatures to replace Biden’s electors with Trump’s.
The conspiracy to defraud the United State and overthrow the government, sedition, is right there in the open, folks. We know it happened because it's still happening. These same people are trying to remove Biden and all Democrats from power.
The question remains what we choose to do about it. Because if the answer is "nothing" then the days of MAGA bloodshed and violence will only get exponentially worse.
A man was arrested this week for threatening violence over the dictionary definition of “female,” the latest indication of where things are headed in this moment of homophobic and transphobic hate.
According to the Department of Justice, 34-year-old Californian Jeremy David Hanson sent threatening messages to Springfield, Massachusetts-based Merrimack-Webster through the dictionary’s online contact form.
“[Your] headquarters should be shot up and bombed,” Hanson wrote. ”It is sickening that you have caved to the cultural Marxist, anti-science tranny [sic] agenda and altered the definition of ‘female’ as part of the Left’s efforts to corrupt and degrade the English language and deny reality. You evil Marxists should all be killed. It would be poetic justice to have someone storm your offices and shoot up the place, leaving none of you commies alive.”
There’s good reason to take threats like Hanson’s seriously. Street violence against the LGBTQ community is increasing at a time when attempts to marginalize and dehumanize them at the legislative level are snowballing.
In Morrisville, Vermont earlier this month, a trans woman named Fern Feather was stabbed to death; the killing came after escalated anti-trans rhetoric from state GOP leaders (who have since blamed the killing on “defund the police”).
A Florida family beat the boyfriend of their youngest son nearly to death and blinded him—teachers in the state are banned from telling children about the very existence of gay and trans people. The state’s Health Department issued guidance recommending against people under the age of 18 transitioning, even socially; a bill in Missouri (one of a series of laws proposed around the country) would make giving gender-affirming treatment punishable by law.
What Republican want is power, and the ability to used armed force against those out of power to keep them there forever. We're getting closer to that breaking point every day.
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