Late Tuesday night Trump released his last batch of pardons, 137 people including Steven Bannon. Here is a description of some of his last minute pardons.
The Washington Post captures Trump’s last day in the White House: President Trump spent his final full day in office Tuesday the same way he spent many of his 1,460 prior days as president: brooding over imagined injustices, plotting retribution against perceived enemies and seeking ways to maximize his power.s week.
On Tuesday, in McConnell’s final speech as majority leader, he linked the mob attack to Trump by saying they were fed lies by the president.
January 20 Noon: Trump’s term ends. He left the White House on Marine One with his family at 8am, made a short speech before boarding Air Force One and was in the air by 9AM, headed for Mar-A-Lago.
One final Maggie Haberman Trump story, this one on his last hours as President: The route from the airport to his private club, Mar-a-Lago, was lined with people waving flags, some weeping as he passed. Around 11:30 a.m., Mr. Trump was whisked inside the gates of the Mar-a-Lago compound, leaving behind the press corps that was assigned to cover him for four years. Mr. Pirro’s pardon was announced around that time.
Mr. Trump had another 30 minutes left of his presidency, but he had said all he was going to say.
Coppins on the coming Trump amnesia: Indeed, the narrative now forming in some GOP circles presents Trump as a secondary figure who presided over an array of important accomplishments thanks to the wisdom and guidance of the Republicans in his orbit. In these accounts, Trump’s race-baiting, corruption, and cruel immigration policies—not to mention his attempts to overturn an election—are treated as minor subplots, rather than defining features.
On Friday the new York Times and other outlets ran a story about yet another (final?) Trump scandal regarding attempts to overturn the 2020 election: a plan with President Donald J. Trump to oust Jeffrey A. Rosen as acting attorney general and wield the department’s power to force Georgia state lawmakers to overturn its presidential election results.
Meanwhile, the Senate reached a compromise plan to receive the impeachment articles by Monday and begin a trail February 9.
Monday the Washington Post ran a story about Pence’s now strained relations with Trump. It had this detail: McConnell told others he was enraged with Trump and planned to never speak to him again.
Tuesday Liz Cheney said she will vote to impeach: “Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
Tuesday night Pence officially rejects the House’s request that he invoke the 25th Amendment. And the New York Times reports: Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has told associates that he believes President Trump committed impeachable offenses and that he is pleased that Democrats are moving to impeach him, believing that it will make it easier to purge him from the party, according to people familiar with his thinking…. highlighted the gnawing uncertainty that they and many other Republicans have about whether they would pay more of a political price for abandoning him or for continuing to enable him after he incited a mob to storm the seat of government.
In this piece Edsal reviews the motivations of white male grievance that spurred the attack: Coming days will determine how far this goes, but for the moment the nation faces, for all intents and purposes, the makings of a civil insurgency. What makes this insurgency unusual in American history is that it is based on Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the presidency, that the election was stolen by malefactors in both parties, and that majorities in both branches of Congress no longer represent the true will of the people.
Washington Post reported: A day before rioters stormed Congress, an FBI office in Virginia issued an explicit warning that extremists were preparing to travel to Washington to commit violence and “war,” according to an internal document reviewed by The Washington Post that contradicts a senior official’s declaration the bureau had no intelligence indicating anyone at last week’s demonstrations in support of President Trump planned to do harm.
On Wednesday a group of Congresspeople released a shocking statement: Led by Representative Mikie Sherrill, a New Jersey Democrat and former Navy pilot, more than 30 lawmakers called on Wednesday for an investigation into visitors’ access to the Capitol on the day before the riot. In a letter to the acting House and Senate sergeants-at-arms and the U.S. Capitol Police, the lawmakers, many of whom served in the military and said they were trained to “recognize suspicious activity,” demanded answers about what they described as an “extremely high number of outside groups” let into the Capitol on Jan. 5 at a time when most tours were restricted because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The House impeached Trump for a second time Wednesday afternoon, January 13. Only 10 Republicans joined. Pelosi chose to hold impeachment articles until the Senate plan is made clear.
Washington Post story on Trump’s last days in the White House and plans to relocate to Florida.
Here is a good article describing recent history of Capitol Police racism and incompetence.
Axios tracks the Big Lie going back months before the election.
Georgia may prosecute Trump for the January 2 hone call: Mr. Banzhaf and other legal experts say Mr. Trump’s calls may run afoul of at least three state criminal laws. One is criminal solicitation to commit election fraud, which can be either a felony or a misdemeanor.
There is also a related conspiracy charge, which can be prosecuted either as a misdemeanor or a felony. A third law, a misdemeanor offense, bars “intentional interference” with another person’s “performance of election duties.”
“My feeling based on listening to the phone call is that they probably will see if they can get it past a grand jury,” said Joshua Morrison, a former senior assistant district attorney in Fulton County who once worked closely with Ms. Willis. “It seems clearly there was a crime committed.”
A DOJ report on child separation was released this week: Mr. Hamilton said that former Attorney General Jeff Sessions “perceived a need to take quick action” from Mr. Trump and that after a meeting at the White House on April 3, 2018, Mr. Sessions “directed that I draft a memo that would put in effect a zero-tolerance approach to immigration enforcement at the border.” During a meeting with Mr. Sessions on May 11, 2018, the attorney general told the prosecutors, “we need to take away children,” according to the notes. Moments later, he described Mr. Trump as “very intense, very focused” on the issue, according to one person taking notes at the meeting.
Another person who attended the May 11 meeting wrote about the same part of the conversation involving Mr. Trump: “INTENSE: prosecute everyone.”
