A lot of big stuff has been happening but buried in the avalanche of headlines about vaccines and government stimulus programs is a startling story.
Two U.S. Capitol police officers, both injured by the Insurrection mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6th, have sued former President Trump, charging him with incitement to riot.
While Washington dithers about what to do about our criminal ex-President, two rank-and-file federal police officers, James Blassingame and Sidney Hemby, have sued him for what he is and has been for years: a criminal.
Their lawsuit accuses Trump of:
- Directing Assault and Battery
- Aiding and Abetting Assault and Battery
- Directing Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress
- Incitement to Riot and
- Disorderly Conduct
The chances of winning the lawsuit are rated strong by a constitutional law expert. More on that later.
Trump can be charged with more than incitement to riot if prosecutors have the spine to make him face justice under our increasingly hollow “no man is above the law” legal system. â
But Trump thinks the Constitution puts him above the law.
Trump:” We have the right to do whatever we want.”
Wrong. Article Two says the President has executive power but it doesn’t grant him unlimited total power. Trump flunked civics, like most of his cult followers.
But as Trump bootlicker Kellyanne Conway famously said, the Trump cult has “alternative facts.”
The Capitol Mob chanted: “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!”
In the January 6th Capitol insurrection, then-Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in grave danger. The chants of the mob prove that.
So does a noose and makeshift-gallows erected on the Capitol lawn.
An important unanswered question is, when did Donald Trump know Pence’s life was in jeopardy? We know timing is everything.
Essentially, it’s the same kind of question that swirled around President Richard Nixon in the Watergate scandal: what did he know and when did he know it? We can’t count on Trump to tell the truth. Fact-checkers documented over 30 thousand lies he told during his Presidency.
But the U.S. Secret Service can tell us—and investigators of the Insurrection—what the White House knew and when it was known, right down to the second.
Part of the answer might be at Joint Naval Base Anacostia-Bolling on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington. That’s where recordings of radio traffic between Secret Service agents are stored. An obscure government outfit known as the White House Communications Agency has custody of the Secret Service digital equivalents of police 911 recordings. It is a military agency with all branches of the services participating.
The Presidential and Vice-Presidential security details usually operate on separate radio frequencies but a review of the time-stamped chatter among the agents on each frequency would be revealing.
When the Pence security team decided he had to be evacuated, it is certain the White House was notified.
The Pence security detail may have called the White House uniformed division operations desk which is staffed 24/7. Special ops units like the Secret Service equivalent of SWAT are coordinated by this desk.
A more likely scenario would be the Pence team called the duty desk at the Secret Service Washington field office. This is another 24/7 operation and it can be in instant contact with the White House, the FBI and other security agencies and facilitate a coordinated response. Plus, the field office desk is well equipped to keep track of and save all crisis-related communications traffic.
Crisis protocol says in an emergency like the safety evacuation of the vice-president, the Secret Service is to immediately notify the presidential Chief of Staff.
That would have been Mark Meadows. It would be up to Meadows to notify the President.
Two critical questions for investigators are: precisely when did the Secret Service notify Meadows that Pence was being evacuated and when did he pass that info along to the President?
The timing goes to a key element of the incitement accusations against Trump. Did he encourage his mob to attack the Vice President while he was being evacuated?
Trump complained to the mindless, violent cult that his forever-faithful lapdog, Vice President Pence, had not violated the law and his oath of office by attempting to block the Electoral College election results certification as the President had demanded.
We know the Vice President’s security detail evacuated him at 2:26 pm. But the decision to evacuate was made in the tense minutes before that.
Pence wanted to stay at the capitol, so his security detail hid Pence and his family in a basement location.
By all accounts, Trump, a known television addict, had been watching events unfold on numerous White House monitors tuned to the networks’ coverage of the insurrection. Trump knew what was happening minute by minute. Some reports said he was pleased with the assault on the Capitol.
At 2:24pm, two minutes before Pence and his family were being hustled away from the Trump mob, the President tweeted “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution…”
This is important because the zombie-brained Trump rioters were using cell phones to follow every Tweet he sent out. Afterward, some insurrectionists said they felt they were taking orders from the President himself.
Michele Morrow of Cary, North Carolina, an insurrection participant, spoke with CBS-17 in Raleigh-Durham after the riot and made this observation about what provoked the crowd:
“People got news on their phones that Mike Pence said that he’s not going to object, that everybody got really upset and that’s when they started storming.”
“People got news on their phones that Mike Pence said…”
Where did they get that news? And how did so many of them get it at the same time? It wasn’t from Mike Pence. He was scrambling for safety with his family.
It’s a pretty good guess that the trigger of the mob violence was Trump’s Tweet falsely claiming Pence didn’t have the courage to do what he should have done. It’s an issue for investigators and lawyers to explore with witnesses under oath in a courtroom.
But why is Trump’s tweet about Pence important to the capitol police officers’ lawsuit and other investigations?
Because Michele Morrow’s observation that news about Pence is “when people started storming” goes directly to the issue of incitement by Trump: incitement that led to the injury of 140 capitol police officers and several deaths. If other witnesses like Morrow are found, they can buttress the case against Donald Trump as the violent insurrection instigator.
Professor Laurence Tribe is a Harvard Constitutional law expert who has argued cases 36 times before the U.S. Supreme Court. Tribe thinks the police officers have a strong case against Trump:
“I can imagine that the emotional, as well as the legal appeal of these lawsuits to a garden variety D.C. jury would be pretty considerable. So, I think the President’s attempt to escape accountability is going to be very uphill, when you combine the lawsuits that are also strong, brought by members of Congress, with these suits, it’s very hard to see how the President can avoid being held accountable, and I think that’s good for the future of the country.”
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