Deleted Secret Service texts sent on January 6, the day of the insurrection at the US Capitol, and the day before will be released by Tuesday to the House Committee investigating the failed attempt by supporters of Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 presidential election result, a panel member said.

“You can imagine how shocked we were to get the letter from the [Department of Homeland Security] inspector general saying that he had been trying to get this information and that they had, in fact, been deleted after he’d asked for them,” Committee Member and California Democratic Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren told ABC’s This Week.

“We need all the texts to get the full picture,” Lofgren added.

The Secret Service’s account about how text messages from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack were erased has shifted several times, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security told the House January 6 Select Committee at a briefing on Friday.

At one point, the explanation from the Secret Service for the lost texts was because of software upgrades, the inspector general told the panel, while at another point, the explanation was because of device replacements.

The inspector general also said that though the Secret Service opted to have his office do a review of the agency’s response to the Capitol attack in lieu of conducting after-action reports, it then stonewalled the review by slow-walking production of materials.

After the inspector general raised his complaints, he then discussed the feasibility of reconstructing the texts. But the issues so alarmed the Select Committee that the panel moved hours later to subpoena the Secret Service, according to participants at the briefing.

The string of fast-paced developments on Capitol Hill reflected how the erasure of the text messages – first disclosed in a letter to Congress by the inspector general, Joseph Cuffari – has become a top priority for the congressional inquiry into January 6.

The circumstances surrounding the erasure of the Secret Service texts from the day before and the day of the Capitol attack have become central for the Select Committee as it investigates how it planned to move Donald Trump and Mike Pence as the violence unfolded.

The texts are potentially significant for investigators as the Secret Service played a crucial role in preventing Donald Trump from going to the Capitol that day and wanted to remove then-Vice President Mike Pence from the complex, according to the panel.

In the letter, the inspector general said that certain Secret Service texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 were erased amid a “device replacement program” even after he had requested the messages for his internal inquiry.

The Secret Service has disputed that, saying in a statement that data on some phones were lost as part of a pre-planned “system migration” in January 2021, and that Cuffari’s initial request for communications came weeks later in late February 2021.

But the Select Committee questioned the Secret Service’s emphasis on that date, the participants said, and noted in the subpoena letter that the request for electronic communications in fact first came from Congress, ten days after the Capitol attack.

The congressional request from 16 January 2021 addressed to multiple executive branch agencies – including the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the Secret Service – was for all materials referring or relating to the riot.

Members on the Select Committee were privately skeptical of the notion that the Secret Service managed to inadvertently erase key messages during a 10-day period that was among perhaps the most tumultuous for the agency, the participants said.

If some of the texts were deliberately erased after the 16 January 2021 request, that could amount to obstruction of a congressional investigation, one of the Select Committee’s members added on Friday.

A spokesperson for the Secret Service could not immediately be reached for comment.

The Select Committee has spent recent days trying to establish whether it was all texts from 5 January and 6 January 2021 that were lost or just some, exactly how the texts came to be erased, and whether additional days’ worth of texts from that month were missing.

The participants at the briefing said Cuffari was not able to provide clear answers on those questions, beyond the fact that he understood a proportion of texts from both the day before, and the day of, the Capitol attack remain unaccounted for.

The unanswered questions were because of a lack of transparency from the Secret Service, the participants said Cuffari indicated. At the briefing, Cuffari said the explanation for the lost texts shifted from software upgrades to device upgrades to still other issues.

Cuffari also expressed optimism to the Select Committee that the erased texts could be reconstructed through previous back-ups of messages or tools available to federal law enforcement, the participants said.

The Justice Department inspector general has previously been able to retrieve lost texts, using “forensic tools” in 2018 to recover messages from two senior FBI officials who investigated former presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Trump and exchanged notes criticizing the latter.

The controversy over the erased Secret Service texts erupted on Wednesday after Cuffari’s letter became public, and the Select Committee went into overdrive to assess the impact on its investigation.

That prompted the select committee chairman Bennie Thompson to discuss the matter with the panel’s staff director, David Buckley, and his deputy, Kristin Amerling, and later with the full Select Committee, which asked Cuffari to provide a closed-door briefing.

If symptoms of cover-up persist, see your attorney general.

August 8, 2022

One of the oldest political maxims in Washington is that the cover-up is always worse than the crime. But it's hard to think of any transgression worse than the attempt by Donald Trump and his accomplices to overthrow our system of democracy and thwart the peaceful transfer of power. Yet, despite the fact that much of the evidence for their misdeeds was out in the open, it's clear Trump's minions tried valiantly to cover up whatever facts we didn't know.

About a month after the attack on the US Capitol by Trump's howling MAGA mob, it was learned that official White House call logs for that date showed a suspicious gap of more than seven hours for January 6 between 11:06 a.m. and 6:54 p.m. In other words, there’s no record of the calls we now know were made that afternoon between Trump and Republican allies like Senators Mike Lee, Tommy Tuberville and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.

The Presidential Records Act of 1978 requires White House officials to maintain documentation of the president's "activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies." But the Presidential Daily Diary that supposedly chronicles his every moment remained curiously silent during the Capitol assault. And despite his well-known fondness for being in front of a lens, Trump ordered White House photographer Shealah Craighead not to take any pictures of his activities, either.

Then, last month the Secret Service acknowledged that cell phone text messages from January 5 and 6, 2021 of at least ten agents had been erased. And guess what? The Department of Homeland Security's Trump-appointed inspector general, Joseph Cuffari (pictured above desperately trying to cover up his cover-up), knew about it as early as May 2021, discouraged any investigation into it, and sat on this information for a year.

But it gets worse. Cuffari’s office was also informed that text messages sent or received during the same period by then-acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf and then-acting Deputy Secretary Ken Cuccinelli also couldn’t be found. Another tidbit Cuffari neglected to tell Congress.

Plus, last week CNN reported the phones of former acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller, former Chief of Staff Kash Patel and former Army secretary Ryan McCarthy (all of them Trump stooges who were involved in the decision not to send National Guard troops to the Capitol) were wiped as well.

White House phone logs missing. No record of Trump's activities. Secret Service, DHS and DOD calls and text messages deleted. Are you starting to notice a theme here? Will Merrick Garland?

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 19, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week, the inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, Joseph Cuffari, told the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol that the U.S. Secret Service had erased text messages between agents on January 5 and January 6, 2021, during the time of the attack. Last Friday, July 15, the committee subpoenaed those records from the U.S. Secret Service. Today, the Secret Service said it had only one new text to provide and that any other texts from its agents around January 6 have been deleted and cannot be recovered. Agents were supposedly told to upload their messages to an internal agency drive before a general reset of cell phones, but many did not do so. A Secret Service spokesperson said that the deletion was not on purpose, but the phone reset began on January 27, eleven days after Congress requested the information be preserved. Because its agents protected then-president Trump and then–vice president Mike Pence on January 6, their text messages could provide important context for the events of that day including, for example, Pence’s apparent reluctance to get into a vehicle driven by a Secret Service agent, or why agents apparently permitted Trump to record a video outside the White House while the Capitol was under attack. Like every other branch of government, the Secret Service is required to preserve its records. Today, the chief records officer of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), Laurence Brewer, sent a letter to Damian Kokinda, the records officer of the Department of Homeland Security, about “the potential unauthorized deletion” of the texts. Brewer asked the Secret Service to investigate and to send all information about deleted records to NARA within 30 days. While this seems a bit like locking the door after the horse has left the barn, let me just say that no one with any brains at all messes with archivists. That Secret Service members were willing to purge texts that they knew by law they had to preserve suggests that they calculated it would be better to face the fallout for deleting the texts than the fallout from whatever was in those texts. In Georgia, legal filings today revealed that the 16 people who created a false slate of electors for Trump have been told they are targets of the grand jury’s investigation into the attempt to steal the 2020 election in that state. Those false electors are trying to quash subpoenas for their testimony, claiming the subpoenas are “unreasonable and oppressive.” Despite reports that a Trump campaign official urged them to operate in “complete secrecy,” they claim they did not know how “certain high level members of the Trump team” intended to use those false electors, and had provided the slate only in case the real slate of electors was rejected. Thus, they say, they did nothing wrong. But they did sign their names to a document saying they were the “duly elected and qualified Electors for President and Vice President of the United States of America from the State of Georgia,” and they submitted that document to NARA (archivists, again). In an interview today, Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly Robin Vos said that earlier this month (not a typo), Trump called him to ask him to decertify the 2020 election, a plan some Republicans in the legislature are backing. Vos notes that the legislature does not have the authority to “reclaim” electors. After Vos declined to join Trump’s effort, Trump posted a message saying: “The Democrats would like to sincerely thank Robin, and all of his fellow RINOs [Republicans in Name Only], for letting them get away with ‘murder.’ A Rigged & Stolen Election!” On Thursday, the January 6 committee will hold another public hearing, this one in prime time. Today, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) announced he has Covid, so the vice chair, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), will run the hearing. The topic will be Trump’s behavior on January 6, 2021—what he did do and what he didn’t—and former deputy national security advisor Matthew Pottinger and former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews are scheduled to testify. Both Pottinger and Matthews resigned immediately after January 6. Pottinger said that he decided to quit when he read Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet attacking Pence as not having “the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” even while Pence’s life was in danger. Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified before the January 6 committee, has been formally censured by the Arizona Republican Party. Tonight, the chair of the party announced the censure over a number of “offenses.” The censure called for voters to throw Bowers out of office. While Trump’s people try to evade the law and establish minority rule, others are trying to change it to reflect the wishes of the majority of Americans. Capitol Police today arrested 34 people, including 17 Democratic members of Congress, for engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience as they protested in front of the Supreme Court in support of abortion rights. Sitting on the street, they were blocking traffic, so police immediately ordered them to leave. When they refused, they were arrested. Representative Carolyn Maloney (D-NY), who at 76 has seen all this before, later said: “There is no democracy if women do not have control over their own bodies and decisions about their own health, including reproductive care. I have the privilege of representing a state where reproductive rights are respected and protected—the least I can do is put my body on the line for the 33 million women at risk of losing their rights. The Republican Party and the right-wing extremists behind this decision are not pro-life, but pro-controlling the bodies of women, girls, and any person who can become pregnant. Their ultimate goal is to institute a national ban on abortion. We will not let them win. We will be back.” On Friday, Lauren Robel, the former dean of Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law, filed a misconduct complaint with the Indiana Supreme Court Disciplinary Commission against Indiana attorney general Todd Rokita. Rokita’s inflammatory statements about the physician who provided abortion care to the ten-year-old rape victim forced to travel from Ohio to Indiana to obtain an abortion after the Supreme Court’s June 24 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision overturning Roe v. Wade, put her in danger. Rokita made baseless claims on the Fox News Channel that the physician had not reported the case properly as child abuse, and he began to investigate her medical license. In fact, the physician had reported the abuse as Indiana law required. This afternoon, the House of Representatives passed a bill to protect gay marriage. The Respect for Marriage Act repeals the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as “only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife” and allowed states to refuse to recognize same-sex marriages. The 2015 Supreme Court decision in Obergefell v. Hodges overrode DOMA, but in case this Supreme Court goes after Obergefell, as it has suggested it might do, members of the House want to make sure DOMA doesn’t again become the law of the land. The bill passed by a vote of 267 to 157. Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo noticed something about the vote. Not surprisingly, all Democrats voted in favor. Also not surprisingly, 157 Republicans– 77% of the caucus– voted no. The surprise is that 47 Republicans joined the Democrats to vote yes on the measure, and another 7 did not vote. These Republicans were likely willing to vote in favor in part because the new law defers to states to permit them to deny same-sex marriage licenses– although it requires them to recognize marriages from other states– and Republicans tried hard to argue that such a measure was unnecessary. But in the end, 54 Republicans were unwilling to go on record against gay marriage, which a whopping 70% of Americans—including 55% of Republicans—support.—

—

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/07/15/secret-service-subpoena-erased-texts/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/secret-service-one-text-message-january-6-committee

https://www.archives.gov/files/records-mgmt/resources/ud-2022-0054-dhs-usss-open.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/secret-service-texts-national-archives/index.html

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000182-178d-dc74-abc3-97cd410e0000

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/06/fake-trump-electors-ga-told-shroud-plans-secrecy-email-shows/

https://www.politico.com/f/?id=00000182-182a-d7d7-a3c2-d8aaa0ce0000

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/19/false-georgia-electors-da-probe-00046593

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/19/complaint-rokita-indiana-abortion/

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/19/trump-asked-wisconsin-speaker-to-decertify-biden-2020-election-win.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/former-white-house-aides-to-testify-at-next-jan-6-hearing/2022/07/18/b0c11940-06f8-11ed-80b6-43f2bfcc6662_story.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/19/matthew-pottinger-jan-6-trump-tweet-pence/

https://rules.house.gov/sites/democrats.rules.house.gov/files/BILLS-117HR8404IH.pdf

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/this-is-very-important-4

https://news.gallup.com/poll/350486/record-high-support-same-sex-marriage.aspx

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/19/politics/congress-members-arrested-abortion-protest-supreme-court/index.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/representatives-congress-arrested-today-supreme-court-abortion-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-carolyn-maloney-2022-07-19/

No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen @NoLieWithBTC77% of Republicans who showed up to vote just voted against codifying gay marriage, which would allow the Supreme Court to overturn it. In 2022. Let that sink in.

939 Retweets4,032 Likes

July 19th 2022

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

Irenie

Can you imagine the thinking behind the deletion of Secret Service text messages after being told to upload them to an internal agency drive? What would be the penalty? In the trumpian white house “accidentally”removing confidential documents did happen. Transporting all the way to Mar-A-Lago. And then there’s the habit of flushing ripped up pieces down the loo. Was there a penalty for these infractions? Followers of TFG know there are few consequences for breaking the law. 

“The former president’s Goodfellas-style habit apparently carried over from his days as a businessman; he reportedly tore up displeasing papers as casually as one-ply bathroom tissue. In the White House, West Wing staffers mindful of his obligations under the Presidential Records Act often picked off the floor the shredded refuse and taped it, like Humpty Dumpty, back together again.” 

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/594278-document-dump-turns-toxic-for-trump/

Trump a tenté de faire pression sur Pence pour qu’il bloque la certification L’ancien président Donald Trump a été inculpé mercredi de quatre chefs d’accusation liés à ses tentatives de renverser le résultat de l’élection présidentielle de 2020, dont complot en vue de frauder les États-Unis ; complot en vue d’entraver une procédure officielle ; obstruction et tentative d’obstruction à une procédure officielle ; et complot contre les droits. Trump nie toute faute et il a critiqué à plusieurs reprises l’enquête de l’avocat spécial, affirmant qu’elle était politiquement motivée. Dans un article publié sur les réseaux sociaux mardi, il a accusé Smith de “faute du procureur”. L’acte d’accusation de 45 pages mentionne brièvement les services secrets dans le cadre de leur discussion sur l’émeute du Capitole et les efforts allégués pour inciter le vice-président Pence à faire obstruction à la certification de l’élection. L’acte d’accusation indique que le 5 janvier 2021, “le défendeur [Trump] a rencontré seul le vice-président. Lorsque le vice-président a refusé d’accéder à la demande du défendeur de faire obstacle à la certification, le défendeur est devenu frustré et a dit au vice-président que le L’accusé devrait le critiquer publiquement.” “En apprenant cela, le chef de cabinet du vice-président s’est inquiété pour la sécurité du vice-président et a alerté le chef des services secrets du vice-président”, indique l’acte d’accusation. Les services secrets ont évacué Pence pendant l’émeute Plus tard, l’acte d’accusation note qu’à 14 h 25. le 6 janvier 2021, “les services secrets des États-Unis ont été contraints d’évacuer le vice-président vers un lieu sûr”. Les services secrets ont déjà fait l’objet d’un examen minutieux des actions de leurs agents le 6 janvier 2021, après qu’il est apparu que les messages texte des 5 et 6 janvier de cette année avaient été supprimés. Newsweek a contacté les services secrets par e-mail pour commentaires. Les présidents de deux commissions du Congrès ont suggéré l’année dernière qu’il y avait eu une dissimulation des SMS des services secrets des 5 et 6 janvier 2021. En août 2022, les représentants démocrates Carolyn Maloney, alors présidente du comité de surveillance de la Chambre, et Bennie Thompson, alors président du comité de la sécurité intérieure, ont écrit à l’inspecteur général Joseph Cuffari et ont souligné leurs “graves nouvelles préoccupations” concernant les actions de son bureau. Ils ont déclaré que les documents qu’ils avaient obtenus “indiquent que votre bureau a peut-être pris des mesures pour dissimuler l’étendue des dossiers manquants, ce qui soulève de nouvelles inquiétudes quant à votre capacité à exercer de manière indépendante et efficace vos fonctions d’inspecteur général”. En avril, une enquête sur le Bureau de l’inspecteur général s’est étendue pour inclure le rôle potentiel de Cuffari dans les SMS manquants. Il a nié tout acte répréhensible et a déclaré que ses efforts pour réformer le bureau se sont heurtés à la résistance des employés.

They're so hard to get rid of.

October 23, 2023

There are some life lessons that are always important to remember. One is if you leave food on the floor, cockroaches can infest your kitchen. But another is if you don't vote in elections, fascists can infest your government. And, once established, both kinds of destructive pests can be tough to eradicate.

The Poles are certainly trying. For eight years, the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) Party has ruled their nation. During which PiS steadily pushed Poland towards authoritarianism. But last week's parliamentary election, which saw the highest voter participation in over a hundred years (nearly 74%), turned PiS out of power in a bid to return the country to the liberal democracy it used to be.

But can Poland's new government reform a system where public broadcasting, the constitutional court, the judiciary in general, the central bank, the national prosecutor’s office and other state agencies have been packed with PiS loyalists? Says Wojciech Przybylski, head of Warsaw's Res Publica Foundation, “This is the really important question: How to unwind an illiberal democracy?”

It's also a problem here at home. In only four short years as president, Donald Trump managed to stuff the federal government full of MAGAfied, fascism-friendly appointees. And many are proving difficult to dislodge.

Charles Rettig, Trump’s head of the Internal Revenue Service, used tax audits to terrorize low-income earners, while shielding his corporate allies from paying their fair share. President Biden couldn't dump him until his term expired in November 2022.

Then there's Joseph Cuffari, who's still inspector general at the Department of Homeland Security. A report by the Democrats on the House Subcommittee on National Security charged Cuffari with:

a failure to report rampant sexual misconduct and harassment at DHS, and a failure to investigate and disclose to Congress missing Secret Service text messages from the January 6th insurrection.

Also, FBI Director Chris Wray, who engaged in hyper-surveilling Black Lives Matter, but ignored the mountain of evidence warning of a far-right attack on the Capitol in 2021.

And Louis DeJoy, head the US Postal Service, who's been actively sabotaging the agency's functionality. By law Biden can't remove him, and the USPS Board of Governors (for some reason) won't.

Add in the 234 radical-right federal judges (including three Supreme Court justices) with lifetime appointments Trump foisted on our legal system. Plus, the hundreds of extremist MAGAs more or less permanently entrenched in Congress. And we're sadly learning the hard lesson that once fascist vermin infiltrate government, there's practically no getting them out.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 14, 2022

Heather Cox Richardson

Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, a Trump appointee, yesterday sent a surprising letter to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and its House counterpart. The letter said that the Department of Homeland Security had notified Cuffari’s office that “many U.S. Secret Service (USSS) text messages, from January 5 and 6, 2021, were erased as part of a device-replacement program. The USSS erased those text messages after OIG [Office of Inspector General] requested records of electronic communications from the USSS, as part of our evaluation of events at the Capitol on January 6.” Further, the letter said, DHS personnel had repeatedly refused to produce records without first showing them to attorneys, which had created long delays and confusion over “whether all records had been produced.”  

In other words, an inspector general thought the Secret Service had deleted texts from agents on January 5 and 6 after being instructed to produce them. Representative Bennie Thompson (D-MS) chairs both the House Homeland Security committee and the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cuffari’s letter sent the information about deleted texts directly to the top.

The Secret Service immediately responded that “the insinuation that the Secret Service maliciously deleted text messages following a request is false. In fact, the Secret Service has been fully cooperating with the OIG in every respect—whether it be interviews, documents, emails, or texts.”

But this information raises questions about the role of Secret Service members in the events of January 6. Trump blurred the lines between the Secret Service and the presidency when he appointed Secret Service assistant director Anthony Ornato his deputy chief of staff in December 2019. We know Vice President Mike Pence refused to get into a car driven by a Secret Service agent on January 6, apparently concerned that the driver might not follow his instruction, and that President-elect Biden had to be assigned a new Secret Service team out of concerns that the presidential detail was allied with Trump. And last week, the Trump-appointed director of the Secret Service, James Murray, resigned.

The only good news here for Republicans is that the outrage over these deleted (or lost) texts has distracted from the firestorm over the 10-year-old child from Ohio forced to travel to Indiana for an abortion after being raped. That story, reported by the doctor who performed the abortion, was picked up by national news and by President Joe Biden, who asked people to “imagine being that little girl” in a speech about abortion rights.

Ohio’s attorney general Dave Yost told the Fox News Channel that he doubted the story because he had not heard that there had been any report of a rape, although as journalist Magdi Semrau noted on Twitter, sexual assault, especially sexual assault of a child, is rarely reported. Yost later said “there is not a damn scintilla of evidence” that such a thing happened. Right-wing media immediately began to assert that the story was false, and the Indiana attorney general, Todd Rokita, went further, telling Fox News Channel host Jesse Watters that his office would investigate the doctor who provided abortion care to the child, suggesting she had not filed a report on the case as legally required.

Today, law enforcement officers in Columbus, Ohio, arrested a 27-year-old man who confessed to raping the child. In addition, Politico found the required report filed correctly. A lawyer for the doctor released a statement saying the doctor “took every appropriate and proper action in accordance with the law and both her medical and ethical training as a physician. She followed all relevant policies, procedures, and regulations in this case, just as she does every day to provide the best possible care for her patients. She has not violated any law, including patient privacy laws, and she has not been disciplined by her employer. We are considering legal action against those who have smeared my client.”

When this Supreme Court, packed by former president Trump and the Republican Senators with three new “originalists,” handed down the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision on June 24, 2022, many people observed that the dog had caught the car. Republicans have turned out evangelical voters for years with the promise of overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion nationally, but the truth is that Roe was popular, and legal abortion hid the many terrible events that led to its legalization in the first place. According to one estimate, in the 1960s there were between 200,000 and 1.2 million illegal abortions annually, which created such a public health crisis that doctors set out to decriminalize abortion and keep that medical issue between a woman and her doctor.

Now, right off the bat of the Dobbs decision, Americans have to grapple with precisely the sort of case that dramatically illustrates why people require abortion rights.

In response, some anti-abortion activists have doubled down on the idea that no abortion is acceptable. Lawyer Jim Bopp, who is the general counsel for the National Right to Life Committee, told Megan Messerly and Adam Wren of Politico that under the laws he would like to enact, the 10-year-old victim “would have had the baby, and as many women who have had babies as a result of rape, we would hope that she would understand the reason and ultimately the benefit of having the child.”

Since few people can stomach the idea of a 10-year-old rape victim forced to bear a child, other anti-abortion activists are suddenly saying that such an abortion is not an abortion at all because it is necessary to save the life of the mother, although many of the new state laws make no such exception. They have also suddenly begun to say that abortion care for an ectopic pregnancy, which is never viable and which poses a deadly threat to the pregnant person, is not an abortion either. In both cases, this is a sudden carve out that is inaccurate: both of these medical procedures are abortion, and both are illegal now in certain states.

President Biden responded to the Dobbs decision with federal rules clarifying that under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, doctors in hospitals that use federal money must provide appropriate treatment to patients experiencing ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy loss, or other life-threatening conditions, or transfer them to places that will, “irrespective of any state laws or mandates that apply to specific procedures.”  

But Republicans are pushing for even greater restrictions over abortion. Today, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, who was indicted seven years ago for felony securities fraud but has yet to stand trial, sued the Biden administration over that rule, claiming that it is an “attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in this country into a walk-in abortion clinic.”

Meanwhile, Senator James Lankford (R-OK) today blocked an attempt by Senate Democrats to pass a law protecting the right of women to cross state lines to get abortion care. Apparently unaware that one of the key hallmarks of an authoritarian state is its refusal to let citizens cross borders, Lankford indicated he was willing to keep pregnant people from crossing state lines. “Does that child in the womb have the right to travel in their future?” Lankford said. “Do they get to live?”

And although the Supreme Court justified the Dobbs decision with the argument that it would simply send the question of abortion back to the states, a federal abortion ban is already on the table. Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) has introduced HR 705, the so-called Heartbeat Protection Act, to make abortion illegal everywhere.

Today, when asked if Democrats would compromise over abortion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said “We’re not going to negotiate a woman’s right to choose.” She added, “Republicans have sometimes said on the floor that Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope. Yes I do, and I think any Pope would agree.”

Pelosi has five children.

That the extremism of those now in charge of the Republican Party might convince voters to crush the party in the midterms is evident in today’s responses to that extremism. On the same day that Trump teased the idea that he might announce that he’s running for president in 2024 before the midterms, a group of conservative intellectuals released a document proving with extensive evidence that the 2020 election was not stolen, Trump lost it.

That document, “Lost, Not Stolen,” destroys the Big Lie but does not call for getting rid of the many new state laws based on that lie, laws that seem designed to cement the rule of Republicans in certain states regardless of the will of the majorities in those states. It also doesn’t discuss the independent state legislature doctrine, which would enable state legislatures to name whatever slate of presidential electors they wished, regardless of the will of the voters, a doctrine that would have given Trump a second term and that the Supreme Court has said it will consider.

It appears that old-line conservatives would like to push Trump offstage, but his role in the January 6 insurrection got more attention today when a police officer from Washington, D.C., corroborated the testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’s aide, who said she had heard that Trump attacked a Secret Service agent on January 6.

Trump and his children Don Jr. and Ivanka were scheduled to testify under oath tomorrow in New York City in the New York attorney general’s investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices, but that testimony will be put off because of the death today of Ivana Trump, Trump’s first wife and mother of his three eldest children. Ivana Trump, 73, was found dead at the foot of a stairway. Trump announced her death on his social media network, calling her “a wonderful, beautiful, and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”

At the bottom of the announcement was a button to donate to Trump’s political action committee.

—

Notes:

https://lostnotstolen.org//wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Lost-Not-Stolen-The-Conservative-Case-that-Trump-Lost-and-Biden-Won-the-2020-Presidential-Election-July-2022.pdf

Aaron Rupar @atruparPelosi: "We're not gonna negotiate a woman's right to choose." Also Pelosi: "Republicans have sometimes said on the floor that Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows more about having babies than the Pope. Yes I do, and I think any Pope would agree."

1,943 Retweets10,014 Likes

July 14th 2022

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/uploads/20220714-letter-to-house-select-committee.jpg

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/14/anti-abotion-10-year-old-ohio-00045843

https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/2022/07/13/columbus-man-charged-rape-10-year-old-led-abortion-in-indiana/10046625002/

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/qso-22-22-hospitals.pdf

https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2022-05-23/seven-years-later-still-no-trial-for-texas-ag-ken-paxton

https://www.texasattorneygeneral.gov/sites/default/files/images/executive-management/20220714_1-0_Original%20Complaint%20Biden%20Admin.pdf

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/07/14/texas-sues-biden-emergency-abortion/

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3559360-gop-senator-blocks-bill-to-protect-interstate-travel-for-abortion/

Matthew Gertz @MattGertzThe whole Murdoch empire went in on this one.

3,651 Retweets17,493 Likes

July 13th 2022

Magdi Semrau @magi_jayMy initial reaction to this piece was that it was "ok" to fact-check the story, but that the article was poorly executed, particularly in its exclusion of known facts about sexual assault. But then I wondered: how common is it to fact-check another newspaper's work like this? The last line of this fact check was: "If a rapist is ever charged, the fact finally would have more solid grounding." Now, a rapist has been charged and the story has been updated. Getting lots of angry emails but journalism is an accumulation of facts. https://t.co/mzaIarvCKw

Glenn Kessler @GlennKesslerWP

369 Retweets1,324 Likes

July 14th 2022

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/08/1103851631/trump-questioning-july-ny-civil-probe

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/politics/trump-secret-service-january-6-metropolitan-police-officer/index.html

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/14/indiana-abortion-rape-ohio-00045899

https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/14/politics/secret-service-text-messages-erased/index.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/dec/31/joe-biden-secret-service-team-trump-loyalty

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/07/secret-service-murray-resign/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

Gailee Walker Wells

Thank you Heather. Someone wrote somewhere something like ' if the United States saw what the United States was doing to the United States the United States would step in and save the United States from the United States.' It is as though we are hanging on by a feather. These extremists must be muzzled and put back into their caves and under rocks. Every single one of those who have broken their oath of office and participated in the overthrow of our government must be held accountable. We all must speak up and speak out everywhere possible. On their twitter pages. On their Instagrams. On their FB pages. Including those of the NYT that seems to delight in posting Biden's numbers and having misleading lead ins on its social media. We also have to demand that something like The Fairness Doctrine be put back into our federal government to hold all the liars accountable.

Invasive cell phone surveillance monitors calls and text messages

According to findings published by Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari, Ph.D., the Secret Service, and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit repeatedly failed to obtain the correct legal paperwork when carrying out invasive cell phone surveillance. The agencies did not obtain proper search warrants before invading numerous people’s private phone calls.  CLICK TO GET KURT’S…

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