Daily Archives: June 29, 2022

A US federal grand jury has issued subpoenas to the board members of the company merging with Donald Trumps social media company, Truth Social.

The disclosure, made on Monday by the blank cheque company Digital World Acquisition Corporation, is the latest blow to Trumps plans to take Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the creator of Truth Social, public.

TMTG agreed to merge with Digital World last October and was expecting the deal to close by the second half of this year. Both the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, are investigating the merger.

The news is likely to further delay the merger, which would provide Truth Social with $1.3bn in capital, in addition to a stock market listing.

Shares of Digital World fell 9% in morning trading after the company said in a regulatory filing that it had become aware that a federal grand jury in the southern district of New York had issued subpoenas to its directors.

Digital World is a special purpose acquisition company (Spac), a blank cheque company set up to go public and then find a company to merge with. Spacs are not supposed to have a deal lined up before they go public.

The SEC is investigating whether or not Digital World and Trump Media held serious discussions before the Spac went public last September and, if so, why those talks were not disclosed in regulatory filings.

Digital World also said Bruce Garelick, chief strategy officer of Rocket One Capital, a Miami-based investment firm, was resigning from the board. Some of the information requested by the grand jury was about communications with Rocket One.

Michael Shvartsman, founder and chief executive of Rocket One Capital, did not immediately reply to a Reuters request for comment.

We will cooperate with oversight that supports the SECs important mission of protecting retail investors, TMTG said.

Truth Social was launched after Trump was banned from Twitter, where he had more than 88 million followers. Trump currently has 3.37 million followers on Truth Social. The app has had a rocky rollout, plagued by delays, and is still not available to Android mobile users.

Reuters contributed to this article

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Blow for Trumps Truth Social as merger company hit by grand jury subpoenas - The Guardian US

WASHINGTON

Members of then-President Trumps circle of supporters, including his son Donald Trump Jr., pleaded with him to stop the violence on Jan. 6, 2021, indicating that they knew the former president had a key role in inciting the insurrection, according to evidence presented Tuesday by the House select panel investigating the Capitol insurrection.

Fox News host and conservative commentator Laura Ingraham texted Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows on Jan. 6 that the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home.

This is hurting all of us, Ingraham said in a series of text messages that day lambasting Trumps actions. He is destroying his legacy and playing into every stereotype... we lose all credibility against the BLM/Antifa crowd if things go south.

Donald Trump Jr. also texted Meadows, telling him that his father needed to [condemn] this st. Asap. The Capitol Police tweet is not enough.

In addition, Fox News host Sean Hannity texted Meadows, asking him if Trump could make a statement...Ask people to peacefully leave the Capitol.

Many Republican representatives including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California made public statements statements condemning the violence and asked Trump to put an end to it.

He did not do so, until later, much later, Jan. 6 committee Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said at Tuesdays hearing. At 4:17 p.m., Trump finally told rioters to go home, and that he loved them.

The House panel played a clip of Trump, addressing the rioters.

We love you, youre very special, he said. I know how you feel but go home and go home in peace.

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Trump's circle urged him to stop violence at Capitol on Jan. 6 - Los Angeles Times

The House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack is closely focused on phone calls and conversations among Donald Trumps children and top aides captured by a documentary film-maker weeks before the 2020 election, say sources familiar with the matter.

The calls among Trumps children and top aides took place at an invitation-only event at the Trump International hotel in Washington that took place the night of the first presidential debate on 29 September 2020, the sources said.

The select committee is interested in the calls, the sources said, since the footage is understood to show the former presidents children, including Donald Jr and Eric Trump, privately discussing strategies about the election at a crucial time in the presidential campaign.

House investigators first learned about the event, hosted by the Trump campaign, and the existence of the footage through British film-maker Alex Holder, who testified about what he and his crew recorded during a two-hour interview last week, the sources said.

The film-maker testified that he had recorded around seven hours of one-to-one interviews with Trump, then-vice president Mike Pence, Trumps adult children and Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner, the sources said, as well as around 110 hours of footage from the campaign.

But one part of Holders testimony that particularly piqued the interest of the members of the select committee and chief investigative counsel Tim Heaphy was when he disclosed that he had managed to record discussions at the 29 September event.

The select committee is closely focused on the footage of the event in addition to the content of the one-on-one interviews with Trump and Ivanka because the discussions about strategies mirror similar conversations at that time by top Trump advisors.

On the night of the first presidential debate, Trumps top former strategist Steve Bannon said in an interview with The Circus on Showtime that the outcome of the election would be decided at the state level and eventually at the congressional certification on January 6.

Theyre going to try and overturn this election with uncertified votes, Bannon said. Asked how he expects the election to end, Bannon said: Right before noon on the 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency.

The select committee believes that ideas such as Bannons were communicated to advisers to Donald Jr and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, even before the 2020 election had taken place, the sources said leading House investigators to want to review the Trump hotel footage.

What appears to interest the panel is whether Trump and his children had planned to somehow stop the certification of the election on January 6 a potential violation of federal law and to force a contingent election if Trump lost as early as September.

The event was not open to the public, Holder is said to have testified, and the documentary film-maker was waved into the Trump hotel by Eric Trump. At some point after Holder caught the calls on tape, he is said to have been asked to leave by Donald Jr.

Among the conversations captured on film was Eric Trump on the phone to an unidentified person saying, according to one source familiar: Hopefully youre voting in Florida as opposed to the other state youve mentioned.

The phone call a clip of which was reviewed by the Guardian was one of several by some of the people closest to Trump that Holder memorialized in his film, titled Unprecedented, which is due to be released in a three-part series later this year on Discovery+.

Holder also testified to the select committee, the sources said, about the content of the interviews. Holder interviewed Trump in early December 2020 at the White House, and then twice a few months after the Capitol attack both at Mar-a-Lago and his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.

The select committee found Holders testimony and material more explosive than they had expected, the sources said. Holder, for instance, showed the panel a discrepancy between Ivanka Trumps testimony to the panel and Holders camera.

In her interview in December 2020, the New York Times earlier reported, Ivanka said her father should continue to fight until every legal remedy is exhausted because people were questioning the sanctity of our elections.

That interview was recorded nine days after former attorney general William Barr told Trump there was no evidence of election fraud. But in her interview with the select committee, Ivanka said she had accepted what Barr had said.

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January 6 committee focuses on phone calls among Trumps children and aides - The Guardian US

WASHINGTON As the Justice Department expands its criminal investigation into the efforts to keep President Donald J. Trump in office after his 2020 election loss, the critical job of pulling together some of its disparate strands has been given to an aggressive, if little-known, federal prosecutor named Thomas P. Windom.

Since late last year, when he was detailed to the U.S. attorneys office in Washington, Mr. Windom, 44, has emerged as a key leader in one of the most complex, consequential and sensitive inquiries to have been taken on by the Justice Department in recent memory, and one that has kicked into higher gear over the past week with a raft of new subpoenas and other steps.

It is Mr. Windom, working under the close supervision of Attorney General Merrick B. Garlands top aides, who is executing the departments time-tested, if slow-moving, strategy of working from the periphery of the events inward, according to interviews with defense lawyers, department officials and the recipients of subpoenas.

He has been leading investigators who have been methodically seeking information, for example, about the roles played by some of Mr. Trumps top advisers, including Rudolph W. Giuliani, Jenna Ellis and John Eastman, with a mandate to go as high up the chain of command as the evidence warrants.

That element of the inquiry is focused in large part on the so-called fake electors scheme, in which allies of Mr. Trump assembled slates of purported electors pledged to Mr. Trump in swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.

In recent weeks, the focus has shifted from collecting emails and texts from would-be electors in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan to the lawyers who sought to overturn Mr. Bidens victory, and pro-Trump political figures like the head of Arizonas Republican Party, Kelli Ward.

Mr. Windom has also overseen grand jury appearances like the one on Friday by Ali Alexander, a prominent Stop the Steal organizer who testified for nearly three hours. And Mr. Windom, in conjunction with Matthew M. Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, has been pushing the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack to turn over transcripts of its interviews with hundreds of witnesses in the case spurred on by an increasingly impatient Lisa O. Monaco, Mr. Garlands top deputy, according to people familiar with the matter.

The raid last week on the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who played a key role in Mr. Trumps effort to pressure the department to pursue and back his baseless claims of widespread election fraud, was initiated separately by the departments independent inspector general, since Mr. Clark had been an employee at the time of the actions under scrutiny. So was the apparently related seizure last week of a cellphone from Mr. Eastman, who has been linked by the House committee to Mr. Clarks push to help Mr. Trump remain in office.

But Mr. Windom has been involved in almost all the departments other key decisions regarding the wide-ranging inquiry into Mr. Trumps multilayered effort to remain in office, officials said.

For all of this activity, Mr. Windom remains largely unknown even within the Justice Department, outside of two high-profile cases he successfully brought against white supremacists when he worked out of the departments office in Washingtons Maryland suburbs.

Mr. Windoms bosses appear to be intent on preserving his obscurity: The departments top brass and its press team did not announce his shift to the case from a supervisory role in the U.S. attorneys office in Maryland late last year, and they still refuse to discuss his appointment, even in private.

That might not be a bad thing for Mr. Windom, the latest federal official assigned to investigate the former president and his inner circle, a hazardous job that turned many of his predecessors into targets of the right, forcing some to exit public service with deflated reputations and inflated legal bills.

Dont underestimate how every single aspect of your life will be picked over, looked at, investigated, examined you, your family, everything, said Peter Strzok, who was the lead agent on the F.B.I.s investigation into Mr. Trumps ties to Russia until it was discovered he had sent text messages disparaging Mr. Trump.

You think: Im doing the right thing and that will protect you, added Mr. Strzok, who is still bombarded with threats and online attacks more than three years after being fired. I didnt appreciate that there were going to be people out there whose sole goal is to totally destroy you.

Any investigator scrutinizing Mr. Trump, former prosecutors said, is liable to be marked as an enemy, regardless of the nature of their inquiry. They were out to destroy Trump, and they were members of our, you know, Central Intelligence or our F.B.I., Doug Jensen, 42, a QAnon follower from Iowa who stormed the Capitol, said in an interview with federal authorities, reflecting the views of many right-wing conspiracy theorists about Mr. Strzok and other investigators.

Mr. Windom is overseeing at least two key parts of the Justice Departments sprawling investigation of the Capitol attack, according to grand jury subpoenas obtained by The New York Times and interviews with current and former prosecutors and defense attorneys.

June 28, 2022, 8:20 p.m. ET

One prong of the inquiry is focused on a wide array of speakers, organizers, security guards and so-called V.I.P.s who took part in Mr. Trumps rally at the Ellipse near the White House on Jan. 6. which directly preceded the storming of the Capitol. According to subpoenas, this part of the investigation is also seeking information on any members of the executive or legislative branch who helped to plan or execute the rally, or who tried to obstruct the certification of the election that was taking place inside the Capitol that day a broad net that could include top Trump aides and the former presidents allies in Congress.

Mr. Windoms second objective mirroring one focus of the Jan. 6 committee is a widening investigation into the group of lawyers close to Mr. Trump who helped to devise and promote the plan to create alternate slates of electors. Subpoenas related to this part of the inquiry have sought information about Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Eastman as well as state officials connected to the fake-elector scheme.

One of the witnesses he subpoenaed is Patrick Gartland, a small business coach active in Georgia Republican politics, who turned aside efforts by Trump supporters to recruit him as a Trump elector in late 2020.

On May 5, Mr. Gartland, who was grieving the recent death of his wife, answered his front door to find two F.B.I. agents, who handed him an eight-page subpoena, signed by Mr. Windom. The subpoena, which he shared with The New York Times, asked him to provide emails, other correspondence or any document purporting to to be a certificate certifying elector votes in favor of Donald J. Trump and Michael R. Pence.

Mr. Windoms subpoena sought information about all of Mr. Gartlands interactions and appended a list of 29 names, which represents a road map, of sorts, to his wider investigation in Georgia and beyond.

It included Mr. Giuliani; Bernard B. Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner; Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump White House aide; other staff members and outside legal advisers to Mr. Trump, including Mr. Eastman, Ms. Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro; and a handful of Georgia Republicans whose names were listed on potential elector slates.

At least three of the people listed on the subpoena to Mr. Gartland including David Shafer, the chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and Brad Carver, another party official were served similar documents by Mr. Windoms team last week, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

At least seven others not on the list among them Thomas Lane, an official who worked on behalf of Mr. Trumps campaign in Arizona, and Shawn Flynn, a Trump campaign aide in Michigan also received subpoenas, they said.

Mr. Windom, a Harvard alumnus who graduated from the University of Virginias law school in 2005, comes from a well-connected political family in Alabama. His father, Stephen R. Windom, served as the states lieutenant governor from 1999 to 2003, after switching from the Democratic to the Republican Party.

The elder Mr. Windom, who retired from politics after a failed bid to become governor, was known for his earthy sense of humor: In 1999, he admitted to urinating in a jug while presiding over the State Senate chamber during a round-the-clock session, fearful that Democrats would replace him as presiding officer if he took a bathroom break.

His son has a similarly irreverent side, reflected in humor columns he wrote for student publications when he was younger.

In one of them, a brief essay for The Harvard Crimson that ran on Presidents Day in 1998, he professed to be uninterested in the front-page presidential investigation of that era, and oblivious to current events.

I know little about President Clintons current sex scandal or our countrys troubles with Iraq, and I really do not care that much, Mr. Windom wrote. I place much more importance on what I am doing this weekend, why I have not asked that girl out yet or when I am going to have time to exercise tomorrow.

Mr. Windoms later career beginning with his clerkship with Edith Brown Clement, a conservative judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans belied that flippancy. From the start, even as a clerk, he adopted the mind-set of an aggressive prosecutor, writing a law journal article proposing a moderate loosening of a criminal defendants Miranda rights.

Tom was always the go-to guy in the department for the big, important national security cases in and around the Beltway, said Jamie McCall, a former federal prosecutor who worked with Mr. Windom to bring down a white supremacist group known as The Base out of the U.S. attorneys office in Greenbelt, Md., in 2019.

Mr. Windoms exhaustive work on two particular cases brought him to the attention of Mr. Garlands team. One was the trial of The Base in 2020, in which he creatively leveraged federal sentencing guidelines to secure uncommonly lengthy prison terms for the group of white supremacists. The other was the case one year before of Christopher Hasson, a former Coast Guard lieutenant who had plotted to kill Democratic politicians.

But his blunt, uncompromising approach has, at times, chafed his courtroom opponents.

During Mr. Hassons post-trial hearing, Mr. Windom persuaded a federal judge to give Mr. Hasson a stiff 13-year sentence beyond what would typically be given to a defendant pleading guilty to drug and weapons charges as punishment for the violence he had intended to inflict.

During the hearing, Mr. Windom attacked a witness for the defense who argued for leniency; Mr. Hassons court-appointed lawyer at the time who is now the Justice Departments senior pardons attorney said Mr. Windoms behavior was one of the most alarming things that I have heard in my practice in federal court.

Mirriam Seddiq, a criminal defense lawyer in Maryland who opposed Mr. Windom in two fraud cases, said he was a personable but inflexible adversary who sought sentences that, in her view, were unduly harsh and punitive. But Ms. Seddiq said she thought he was well suited to his new job.

If you are going to be a bastard, be a bastard in defense of democracy, she said in an interview.

Adam Goldman and Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.

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The Man Helping Drive the Investigation Into Trumps Push to Keep Power - The New York Times

And it has delivered. The testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the aide to Donald Trumps chief of staff Mark Meadows, was bombshell after bombshell.

It showed that Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani knew the Jan. 6 rally would lead to violence at the Capitol. Giuliani crowed about it four days before the rally. Trump knew the crowd was carrying weapons, but wanted security removed so more of those armed rubes could crowd around the stage and adore him.

In a scene right out of a movie, Trump tried to wrest control of the steering wheel in his limo so he could join the armed, jacked-up mob marching toward the Capitol.

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Given what the House committee has established, based almost entirely on the testimony of Republicans such as Hutchinson, how can Trump and Giuliani and others in that administration avoid criminal charges at this point?

But then, given what theyve gotten away with so far, why would they worry?

On Sunday, the erstwhile presidents erstwhile lawyer Rudy Giuliani was holding court in a supermarket on Staten Island, campaigning for his son, who is running for governor in New York, when a supermarket employee named Daniel Gill walked up, slapped Giuliani on the back, and said, Whats up, scumbag?

Now, the back slap was uncalled for, the language unnecessarily profane. Gill apparently was upset with the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and held Giuliani somewhat responsible for working for an administration that has cemented a conservative bloc on the court.

But what followed, in a country where justice isnt blind so much as its arbitrary, was revealing. Giuliani insisted Gill be arrested and the NYPD duly charged him with assault with intent to cause physical injury, harassment in the second degree, and menacing in the third degree. Gills lawyers said he was held in custody for more than 24 hours.

Giuliani went on Curtis Sliwas radio show and said the back slap felt like somebody shot me.

He could have killed me, Giuliani said.

A video of the incident shows something considerably less serious than that. But thats beside the point.

The point is, some guy making minimum wage at a supermarket in New York is facing the full weight of the law for giving Rudy Giuliani a slap on the back and calling him a name while to date, Giuliani has not faced any consequences for participating in a conspiracy to overthrow a presidential election and ruining the lives of a couple of election workers in Georgia.

At the Jan. 6 committee hearing last week, Georgia election worker Shaye Moss testified that she and her mother were subjected to death threats and widespread harassment after Donald Trump and Giuliani falsely accused them of costing Trump the presidential election by engaging in a plot to count phony ballots for Joe Biden.

Mosss mother, Ruby Freeman, said shes afraid to go to the supermarket. I doubt Rudy is despite his near-death experience at the ShopRite on Staten Island.

Gills lawyers at the Legal Aid Society say one of Giulianis entourage followed and threatened Gill after the confrontation, poking him forcefully in the chest, telling him he was going to be locked up. The chest poke was approximately the same as the back slap, unwanted but did not cause physical injury. One gets charged, the other gets bupkis.

Daniel Gill was wrong. He shouldnt have put his hands on Rudy Giuliani. But hes being held accountable for his actions.

When will Rudy Giuliani be held accountable for his? When will Donald Trump?

If this country didnt have double standards, it wouldnt have any standards at all.

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at kevin.cullen@globe.com.

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Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and the standard double standard - The Boston Globe

A video showing supporters of former President Donald Trump calling on the Supreme Court to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 ruling that legalized same-sex marriage in the United States has gone viral on social media.

The comments came after Justice Clarence Thomas said in a concurring opinion to the court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last week that the court has "a duty to 'correct the error' established" in rulings like Obergefell.

In the video, Jason Selvig, a member of the comedy duo the Good Liars, speaks to a man and woman wearing Trump apparel. It is not clear where the video was taken but the caption states that Selvig spoke to the pair over the weekend. The footage has so far been viewed over 400,000 times and shows Selvig trying to find out their opinions on the historic overturning of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 case that secured the right to abortion in the United States.

After the woman said she was against abortion, Selvig asked: "There's been some talk with some people saying we need to protect life, sperm is the seed of life. Would you be in favor of all males who are not married getting vasectomies?"

The man responded "no" to the question, while the woman said: "to each their own."

The video then skipped to when Selvig highlighted Thomas' comments about Obergefell v. Hodges. Selvig asked in the video: "Clarence Thomas, said yesterday, maybe we should take a look at the same-sex marriage ruling. Is that something you think we should look at as well?"

The pair said they did not believe that same-sex couples should be able to get married. Selvig then confirmed whether they would like to see this decision reversed, and the pair agreed. When asked why the female Trump supporter said: "[It is] just how I was brought up and how I believe...It is to each their own, but everyone should have respect in their own biblical sense."

"So, to each their own, but you don't want gay people getting married, and you don't want women choosing what to do with their body?" Selvig said, to which the woman replied "right."

Newsweek reached out to the Good Liars for comment.

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Donald Trump Supporters Call on Gay Marriage to Be Overturned Next - Newsweek

Musician Jack White blasted former President Donald Trump on Friday, blaming him directly for the overturn of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

In a lengthy Instagram post, White called Trump an "unchecked egomaniac" who took the US down "the worst, regressive path to the point of an insurrection in our capital building threatening the lives of the vice president and congress members, and in turn made our govt. an embarrassment to the entire world."

He also lashed out at Trump for appointing three conservative justices to the Supreme Court during his single-term presidency.

"The two party system by proxy puts this clown in a position to pick THREE conservative supreme court justices, THREE," White wrote. "And now these three judges, completely disinterested and unaffected by what the actual majority wants and needs, have just taken the country back to the 1970's to start all over again fighting for women's rights."

White's remarks come after the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The ruling was feared since May when Politico published a leaked draft opinion in which Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito called the decision "egregiously wrong from the start."

Abortion, however, remained legal in the United States until the court handed down the final verdict. But the draft itself was enough to put reproductive rights activists and doctors who perform abortions on edge.

By overturning Roe, the Supreme Court has put the question of the legality of abortion in the hands of individual state legislatures and has essentially made it illegal in at least 22 states to obtain an abortion. There are expected to be added restrictions in several others.

"Well trump, you took the country backwards 50 years," White said. "I hope your dad is smiling and waving down on you from heaven, while his other hand holds a record of all the abortions you secretly paid for behind closed doors."

Others have also credited Trump directly for Roe v. Wade's demise, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.

"Thank you President Trump," Greene said. "God bless you. This got overturned today because of your great work as president, and we want him back."

White with his remarks joins a slew of other prominent individuals who've blasted the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

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Jack White blames Donald Trump for the overturn of Roe v. Wade - Business Insider