Trump’s plot to overturn the election and undermine our democracy continues to become clearer. This morning, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell revealed that former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham, who was Melania Trump’s chief of staff before resigning on January 6, had news for the House Select Committee Investigating the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. She told the committee that in the days before the insurrection, then-president Trump held secret meetings in the White House residence. Trump’s White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, arranged the meetings, and the former chief usher, a Trump loyalist named Timothy Harleth, would send the participants upstairs.
The committee wants to know whether Trump actually planned to walk to the Capitol with the rally attendees as he promised. If he told the crowd he was going but did not actually intend to go, it would offer evidence that he was hoping to incite an insurrection. Grisham told them the president was deeply involved in the plans for the rally and that any plan to walk to the Capitol would be outlined in the presidential line-by-line, a document sent to the Secret Service.
The January 6 committee is also focusing on who originated and executed the plan to create seven fraudulent slates of electors on December 14, 2020. At the time, that effort seemed frivolous, but the events of January 6, when Trump and his allies tried to make Vice President Mike Pence reject the real electors on the grounds there were competing slates, made it clear that the false documents were part of the plot to overturn the election.
Both CNN and the Washington Post reported today that the Trump campaign was behind the effort to create the fake electoral slates. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, helped on at least one occasion by Christina Bobb, an anchor from the right-wing network One America News, distributed language for the drafts, found people to replace real electors who refused to participate in the forgeries, and helped electors get into state capitols to craft the false documents.
The co-chair of the Michigan Republican Party, Meshawn Maddock, was recorded speaking to a group about the election, attributing the push for the fake documents to the Trump campaign. Another one of the 16 Republicans who signed Michigan’s fake document, Shelby Township Clerk Stan Grot, told the Detroit News that he had gotten a call asking him to go to Lansing and sign the document; he believed the call came from a lawyer working for the Trump campaign.
Today the January 6 committee asked Ivanka Trump, the daughter of the former president, to testify voluntarily about the events surrounding January 6. The committee’s 8-page letter laid out more information about those days, demonstrating that it has heard quite a bit about her presence in the White House on January 6 and that Trump’s loyalists that day thought that she alone had the influence to get her father to call the rioters off.
The letter from the committee explained how, exactly, electors are certified. Then, it laid out the White House plan to overturn that legal system, a plan that has led lawyer John Eastman, who outlined it, to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination rather than testify about it because he fears criminal prosecution.
The committee said it knew that “in the days before January 6th, a member of the House Freedom Caucus with knowledge of the President’s planning for that day sent a message to the White House Chief of Staff with this explicit warning: ‘If POTUS [meaning President Trump] allows this to occur…we’re driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic….’”
The committee called attention to Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet saying, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” It listed statements from rioters describing how that tweet set them off: “Once we found out Pence turned on us and that they had stolen the election, like officially, the crowd went crazy….” “Then we heard the news on pence… And lost it… So we stormed.”
The committee asked Ivanka about discussions in the White House after that tweet, as she allegedly tried to get her father to tell the rioters to stop. Why, the committee asked, “didn’t White House staff simply ask the President to walk to the briefing room and appear on live television—to ask the crowd to leave the Capitol?” An interview with someone who had been there suggested, the committee wrote, “certain White House staff believed that a live unscripted press appearance by the President in the midst of the Capitol Hill violence could have made the situation worse.”
The committee noted that when Trump did speak in a video from the Rose Garden, released at 4:17, he told the rioters “We love you, you’re very special….” The committee wants to know what Ivanka has to say about the process of getting Trump to deliver that message.
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