Author: PolitCens

U.S. lawmakers’ investigation into the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol resumed Tuesday with an examination of former President Donald Trump’s encouragement to far-right extremist groups to subvert the democratic process. As VOA’s congressional correspondent Katherine Gypson explains, investigators argue Trump’s claims of election fraud directly led to the attack.
Produced by: Katherine Gypson
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A large majority of Democrats would prefer that their party nominate someone other than incumbent President Joe Biden as its candidate in the 2024 presidential election, a new poll from The New York Times and Siena College found. 

The poll asked respondents who plan to vote in the Democratic primary elections whether they want the party to renominate Biden. Only 26% said that they would like to see Biden on the ballot again, compared to 64% who said they would prefer someone else. 

The poll’s findings paint a grim picture for the incumbent president, whose standing with the public is being battered by high inflation and the inability of his party to push its agenda through the closely divided Senate. 

In one of the survey’s only bright spots for the president, it found that among all voters, in a rematch of the 2020 election, with Biden facing former President Donald Trump in 2024, Biden would win 44% of the vote to Trump’s 41%. 

Age a major factor 

Democratic respondents who said they would prefer that the party nominate a different presidential candidate in 2024 were asked to explain why. One-third said that Biden’s age is a factor. At 79, Biden is already the oldest person ever to serve as president, and he will be nearly 82 at the time of the 2024 election. 

It was the oldest cohort of survey respondents, those over 65, who were most concerned about Biden’s age, with 60% citing it as their primary reason for wanting a different candidate. The youngest cohort, those aged 18 to 35, were the least likely to cite Biden’s age, with only 14% choosing it as their primary concern. 

Nearly as many respondents, 32%, cited Biden’s job performance as their reason. Twelve percent said they would simply prefer someone else, and 10% said that they don’t view the president as being “progressive enough.” 

Country seen moving in ‘wrong direction’ 

The new poll found that 77% of Americans believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus only 13% who believe it is headed in the right direction. 

The stark assessment of the country’s trajectory held across all the different subgroups tracked by the poll. A majority of Republicans (89%), Independents (81%), and Democrats (63%) chose the “wrong direction.” When pollsters divided respondents by age, education, and ethnicity, majorities of each agreed with the negative assessment. 

The subgroup with the least negative assessment of the country’s path was Black Americans, 54% of whom said they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction, versus 30% who believe it is on the right track. White Americans were most dissatisfied with 82% viewing the country as moving in the wrong direction while just 9% see it as on the right track. 

Low approval of Biden 

Asked whether they approve or disapprove of how Biden is handling his job, only 33% of respondents said they approved. Among Democrats, the number was 70%, a low figure for a party’s incumbent president. Among Republicans, the figure was just 8%. 

The poll tried to separate respondent’s personal feelings about Biden from their sense of how he is performing as president. When asked if they have a favorable or unfavorable impression of Biden personally, the numbers were not much better. 

Only 39% said they had a favorable impression of the president, with 58% reporting an unfavorable impression. The partisan divide was stark, with 85% of Democrats reporting a favorable impression, compared to 30% of Independents and just 7% of Republicans. 

White House reacts 

Asked about the poll during a news briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre noted that it also found that 92% of Democrats would vote for Biden in a rematch against Trump. More broadly, though, she said that the administration is not focused on polls. 

“There’s going to be many polls; they’re going to go up and they’re going to go down,” she said. “This is not the thing that we are solely focused on.” 

Instead, she said, the White House is focused on things like the bipartisan gun control legislation that Biden signed into law Monday, fighting inflation, and creating jobs

Bad sign for midterms 

Kyle Kondik, the executive editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, told VOA that Biden’s approval numbers in the new poll are significantly lower than those in most other public polling, but said they still reflect a troubling trend for the president and his party. 

“The numbers have been slowly slipping, really for a long time going back to last year,” he said. “There’s just been this erosion and the erosion continues. Whatever the bottom is, it doesn’t seem like he’s hit it yet.” 

It’s bad news for the Democrats, given that November’s midterm elections, which will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years, are only four months away. 

“Typically bad approval is a contributor to a bad midterm outcome for a president’s party,” Kondik said. 

Rumors of a primary challenge 

The news that many Democrats would prefer that Biden not run for a second term will fuel speculation that another Democratic leader might challenge the president in a primary election. 

While primary challenges to a sitting president are uncommon, they are not unheard of. In 1992, Republican President George H.W. Bush faced a primary challenge from conservative firebrand Pat Buchanan. In 1980, Democratic President Jimmy Carter was challenged by Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy. In 1976, Republican President Gerald Ford was challenged by Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California. 

In all three cases, the sitting president defeated his primary challenger. All three, however, went on to lose in the general election. 

While Biden insists that he will run again, and there are no prominent Democratic politicians who have publicly broken from Biden, experts said that if Biden’s numbers continue to decline, the likelihood that one or more Democrats will challenge him increases. If that happens, Biden will likely feel the need to take dramatic action to demonstrate that he remains in control of the party. 

“The problem of an unpopular incumbent is that his problems and limitations are concrete, but all his potential replacements’ advantages and disadvantages are hypothetical,” Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told VOA in an email exchange. 

“As (California Governor) Gavin Newsom, (Illinois Governor) J.B. Pritzker and others are emboldened to position themselves for 2024, Biden will feel increased pressure to be more radical and confrontational,” he said. 

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden touted himself as a dealmaker who would find common ground between Democrats and Republicans to pass critical legislation. As president, he has signed into law bipartisan bills to overhaul American infrastructure and curb gun violence, both of which are broadly popular. But many Democratic priorities remain undone, from protecting voting rights to an ambitious plan to combat climate change, boost educational opportunities, and help working families.
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The congressional panel investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol last year is set to hear testimony Tuesday linking far-right extremist groups to the mayhem as they attempted to block the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election over then-incumbent Donald Trump.

The House of Representatives committee has yet to say who will testify at its latest high-profile hearing, but one is expected to be Jason Van Tatenhove, a self-described “propagandist” for the Oath Keepers, an anti-government militia. Its members were among about 2,000 Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol.

Other testimony is expected to focus on the role played by the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. Five of its leaders have been charged with seditious conspiracy in connection with the insurrection at the Capitol and are awaiting trial later this year. The same charge has been filed against 11 Oath Keepers, three of whom have already pleaded guilty.

Trump has derided the committee’s investigation, calling its nine members — seven Democrats and two vocal anti-Trump Republicans — “political thugs and hacks.”

The question facing the investigative panel is showing what link, if any, the extremist groups had specifically to Trump, while more broadly detailing contacts they had with his political associates as he sought to retain power by upending the official state-by-state vote counts showing that Biden had won.

Central to the hearing is a tweet Trump sent to millions of his followers on Dec. 19, 2020, saying, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

Representative Jamie Raskin, the committee member who will be handling much of the questioning Tuesday, told CBS News, “Donald Trump was, of course, the central figure who set everything into motion. He was the person … who identified January 6th as the date for the big protest, and he announced that in his tweet in the middle of the night of December 19th after a crazy meeting (with political aides), one that has been described as the craziest meeting in the entire Trump presidency.”

“And then just an hour or two later,” Raskin said, “Donald Trump sent out the tweet that would be heard around the world, the first time in American history when a president had called a protest against his own government, in fact, to try to stop the counting of Electoral College votes in a presidential election he had lost. Absolutely unprecedented. Nothing like that had ever happened before.”

“So, people are going to hear the story of that tweet and then the explosive effect it had in Trump world, and specifically among the domestic violent extremist groups, the most dangerous political extremists in the country at that point,” Raskin said.

Raskin told online news organization Politico, “Our investigation shows that there was a tremendous convergence of interests between the domestic violent extremist groups and the broader (Make America Great Again) movement” supporting Trump. “This hearing will be the moment when one sees both the convergence of efforts at a political coup with the insurrectionary mob violence. We see how these two streams of activity become one.”

Representative Zoe Lofgren, another committee member, told CNN on Sunday that Trump ally Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, for a short time in 2017 Trump’s national security adviser, were two possible links to the extremist groups.

The protesters who stormed into the Capitol ransacked congressional offices, scuffled with police and for hours blocked the certification of Biden’s victory. Eventually the Capitol building, a symbol of American democracy, was cleared of protesters, and Biden won the Electoral College vote by a 306-232 count.

In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes is dependent on its population, with the biggest states holding the most sway.

More than 800 of the protesters have subsequently been charged with an array of offenses from trespassing to assaulting police officers, and more than 300 have pleaded guilty or been convicted in trials. Sentences have ranged from a few weeks in prison to more than four years. The sedition charges filed against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers carry substantially longer terms.

At Tuesday’s hearing, the committee could also show videotaped segments of closed-door testimony that Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House counsel, gave the committee last Friday. He was often in close proximity to Trump in the days before the riot and as Trump watched it unfold on a White House television, refusing entreaties for more than three hours from aides and his older daughter, Ivanka, to call off the rioters.

At its most recent hearing, the panel heard testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, the top assistant to Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff, that Trump in the waning weeks of his presidency became increasingly angry and volatile regarding his re-election loss.

She testified that Trump knew some of his supporters at a rally near the White House were armed but still urged them to walk to the Capitol. Hutchinson said Trump berated his Secret Service detail for not driving him to the Capitol, and in December 2020, threw his lunch against a wall of a White House dining room when he learned that then-Attorney General William Barr had concluded there was no election fraud.

Witnesses at earlier hearings told the investigative panel that there were minimal voting irregularities, not enough to overturn Biden’s Electoral College victory.

In addition, Trump was told it would be illegal for then-Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block Biden’s victory as Pence presided over the congressional Electoral College vote count. Still, Trump privately and publicly demanded the vice president block certification of Biden’s victory. To this day, Trump contends he was cheated out of another White House term.

Over the weekend, Trump said in a letter that he would allow one of his former aides, Steve Bannon, to testify before the investigative panel. He also said the committee had “allowed no Due Process, no Cross-Examination, and no real Republican members or witnesses to be present or interviewed. It is a partisan Kangaroo Court.”

Republicans blocked a full-scale probe that would have been patterned after the investigation of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.
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Donald Trump’s former close adviser Steve Bannon has told the congressional panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol that he is ready to testify, a change of heart days before he is due to be tried for contempt of Congress.

In a letter to the committee seen by Reuters, Bannon’s lawyer, Robert Costello, wrote to say the former president would waive the claim of executive privilege that Bannon had cited in refusing to appear before the committee. 

Bannon, a prominent figure in right-wing media circles who served as Trump’s chief strategist in 2017, is scheduled to go on trial July 18 on two criminal contempt charges for refusing to testify or provide documents.  

The letter from the lawyer said Bannon preferred to testify publicly, but Representative Zoe Lofgren, a committee Democrat, told CNN that ordinarily the committee takes a deposition behind closed doors.

“This goes on for hour after hour after hour. We want to get all our questions answered. And you can’t do that in a live format,” Lofgren said. “There are many questions that we have for him.”

Throughout the House of Representatives committee hearings, videotaped snippets of closed-door testimony by witnesses under oath have been shown to the public.

Trump has been chafing that none of his supporters have testified in his defense at the committee hearings, which, separate from the trial, are focused on the attack by Trump supporters seeking to stop the certification in Congress of Trump’s defeat by Joe Biden in the November 2020 election.

In a letter from Trump to Bannon seen by Reuters, Trump said he was waiving executive privilege because he “watched how unfairly you and others have been treated.”

The House panel is due to hold public hearings on Tuesday and Thursday this week.
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The select House of Representatives Committee investigating the January 6th attack on the United States Capitol by supporters of then-President Trump is set to hold its next scheduled hearing Tuesday. Committee members say the hearing will focus on white nationalist groups’ participation in the attack. As VOA’s Arash Arabasadi reports, the seventh hearing follows a closed-door session last week with a former top White House lawyer.
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U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is in Bangkok, where Myanmar is expected to feature prominently in meetings Sunday with Thailand’s leaders.

The main topic of their discussions will likely be the crisis in Myanmar, said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Kritenbrink, adding the U.S. would continue to “condemn, in the strongest possible terms, the Burmese military regime’s brutal actions since the coup d’état, the killing of nearly 2,000 people and displacing more than 700,000 others.” Myanmar is also known as Burma.

Blinken is to meet with Prime Minister Prayut Chan-ocha, Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Don Pramudwinai. Expanding health and climate cooperation are also on the agenda, as is next year’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation annual meeting, which the U.S. will host, according to the State Department.

The State Department announced Sunday that Blinken will travel to Tokyo on Monday to offer condolences to the Japanese people on the death of former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and to meet with senior Japanese officials.

Blinken arrived in Thailand a few days after his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, who was on his own tour of Southeast Asia. Over the weekend, Wang visited Myanmar, his first visit to the country since the military seized power last year.

Blinken and Wang met Saturday at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, and spoke for several hours.

The top U.S. diplomat told his Chinese counterpart during those meetings that China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine is complicating U.S.-Chinese relations at a time when they are already beset by rifts and enmity over numerous other issues.

Wang blamed the U.S. for the downturn in relations and said American policy has been derailed by what he called a misperception of China as a threat.

“Many people believe that the United States is suffering from a China-phobia,” the Chinese foreign minister said, according to a Chinese statement. “If such threat-expansion is allowed to grow, U.S. policy toward China will be a dead end with no way out.”

Blinken said he conveyed “the deep concerns of the United States regarding Beijing’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and activity toward Taiwan.”

Blinken also noted he addressed U.S. concerns over Beijing’s use of the strategic South China Sea, the repression of freedom in Hong Kong, forced labor, the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, and the genocide in Xinjiang.

Additionally, the U.S. secretary of state said that he and Wang discussed ways in which there could be more cooperation between the two countries in areas such as climate crisis, food security, global health and counternarcotics.

For his part, Wang said China and the United States need to work together to ensure that their relationship will continue to move forward along the right track.

Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was their first in-person since the chief U.S. diplomat unveiled the Biden administration’s strategy to outcompete the rival superpower. In his remarks at the time, Blinken said the U.S. was not seeking to decouple from China and the relationship between the world’s two largest economies was not a zero-sum game.

On Friday, the G-20 talks were dominated by discussion of the war in Ukraine and its impact on energy and food supplies.

Indonesia, as the meeting’s host country, called on ministers to “find a way forward” in discussing the war and its impact on rising food and energy prices.

“It is our responsibility to end the war sooner rather than later and settle our differences at the negotiating table, not at the battlefield,” Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi said at the opening of the meeting, invoking the U.N. Charter to urge multilateralism and trust.

Foreign ministers shared concerns about getting grain shipments out of Ukraine and avoiding devastating food shortages in Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere. But talks were marked by sharp tension: Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sat at the same table but did not speak directly.
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In a visit to Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West Bank next week, President Joe Biden is expected to nudge Riyadh toward diplomatic normalization with Israel. This would be a huge expansion of the Abraham Accords, the Trump-era Middle East peace plan. White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report.
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Former White House counsel Pat Cipollone met for a private interview with the January 6 committee for about eight hours Friday regarding his role in trying to prevent then-President Donald Trump from challenging the 2020 presidential election and joining the violent mob that laid siege to the Capitol.

Cipollone, once a staunch presidential confidant who had defended Trump during his first impeachment trial, had been reluctant to appear formally for an on-record interview. Like other former White House officials, it is possible he claimed his counsel to the Republican president as privileged information he was unwilling to share with the committee.

It remained unclear after he left Capitol Hill Friday afternoon whether he had remained within those parameters during the hourslong interview.

Cipollone has been a sought-after witness after bombshell testimony revealed his apparently desperate and last-ditch efforts to prevent Trump’s actions. The panel was told he had warned that the defeated president would be charged with “every crime imaginable” if he went to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, trying to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election. Cipollone was subpoenaed for his testimony.

The panel said Cipollone was “uniquely positioned to testify” in a letter accompanying the subpoena issued last week.

“Mr. Cipollone repeatedly raised legal and other concerns about President Trump’s activities on January 6th and in the days that preceded,” Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, said in a statement. “While the Select Committee appreciates Mr. Cipollone’s earlier informal engagement with our investigation, the committee needs to hear from him on the record, as other former White House counsels have done in other congressional investigations.”

Cipollone’s central role came into focus during a surprise committee hearing last week, when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described his repeated efforts to stop Trump from joining the mob at the Capitol.

Hutchinson said Cipollone urged her to persuade her boss, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, not to let Trump go to the Capitol.

Hutchinson testified that she had been told Trump was irate when he was ultimately prevented by his security team from going to the Capitol that day.

On the Sunday before the January 6 attack, Cipollone was also part of a key meeting with Justice Department officials at the White House who threatened to resign if Trump went ahead with plans to install a new acting attorney general who would pursue his false claims of voter fraud.

One witness testified to the committee that during that meeting, Cipollone referred to a proposed letter making false claims about voter fraud as a “murder-suicide pact.”

Cipollone and his attorney, Michael Purpura, who also worked at the Trump White House, did not respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this week, Trump responded to news of Cipollone’s cooperation on his social media platform, Truth Social, calling it bad for the country.
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Here is a summary of Native American-related news around the U.S. this week:

Cherokee veteran receives highest military honor

President Joe Biden awarded Cherokee Nation citizen Dwight Birdwell America’s highest military decoration during a White House ceremony Tuesday. Birdwell, 74, was awarded the Medal of Honor for extraordinary heroism during the Tet Offensive, a series of shock and awe attacks by North Vietnamese forces in January 1968.

“I’m grateful for all you have given our country and that at long last your story is being honored as it should have been always,” Biden told Birdwell (see video below), noting that Native Americans serve in U.S. armed forces at a higher percentage rate than “any other cohort.”

More than 42,000 Native Americans and Alaska Natives served in the Vietnam War, 90% of them voluntarily. Two-hundred-twenty-six lost their lives.

Nevada county removes barriers to Shoshone vote

Native Americans face a number of obstacles to participating in national elections, including access to polling sites and language access for those who aren’t proficient in English. Nye County, Nevada, this week became the first county in America to provide Shoshone language assistance to Native American voters — in this case, the Duckwater Shoshone Tribe of the Duckwater Reservation. The 1975 Voting Rights Act requires certain states and local governments to provide voter registration forms, ballots and other election materials where 5% or more of eligible voters are “minority language speakers.” U.S. Census data from 2021 show the tribe now meets that standard. Nye County first in nation to offer voting in Shoshone language

Blackfeet tribe using dogs to nose out disease

Researchers on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana are running a yearlong study to see whether dogs can be trained to sniff out chronic wasting disease (CWD) and other toxins in wild game and plants that are consumed or used in traditional cultural practices. While CWD hasn’t infected humans yet, scientists worry about the health risk of eating or handling infected wild game such as deer, moose or elk.

Dogs could help sniff out chronic wasting disease on a reservation in Montana

Works by ‘father of modern Native art’ on display

New Yorker magazine this week highlights the art of Oscar Howe (Mazuha Hokshina, or Trader Boy), a Yanktonai Dakota artist from the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota (1915-1983), whose work merged traditional tribal art with contemporary abstract styles and earned him regard as the father of the Native American fine art movement. His work is on display until September 11, 2022, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York; the exhibition will be on view at the Portland Art Museum, October 29, 2022–May 14, 2023, and at the South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University, June 10, 2023–September 17, 2023.

A Frequently Misunderstood American Master

Google honors noted Native comedian

Google Doodle this week marked what would have been the 71st birthday of Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to appear on U.S. national television. A citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, Howe used humor to shed light on many of the grim realities of the Native American experience, poking fun at stereotypes about Natives and non-Natives.

Hill’s portrait/Doodle is the work of Alanah Astehtsi Otsistohkwa (Morningstar) Jewell, a French-Haudenosaunee artist from the Oneida Nation of the Thames in Ontario, Canada.

Charlie Hill’s 71st Birthday

 
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In his visit to the Middle East next week, President Joe Biden is set to push for Israel’s deeper integration in the region and urge Gulf countries to pump more oil to alleviate pressure on the global energy market. Observers will watch how Biden balances these U.S. interests with American values of human rights, in light of the killings of journalists Jamal Khashoggi and Shereen Abu Akleh. VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has the story.
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One of the key lawmakers investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol last year says that if the Justice Department concludes that former President Donald Trump fomented the mayhem to block Congress from certifying his 2020 reelection loss — it should not hesitate to prosecute him.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the vice chairperson on the panel investigating the insurrection and a vocal anti-Trump Republican, acknowledged to ABC News that the prosecution of a former U.S. president would be unprecedented and “difficult” for an already politically divided country.

But the Wyoming Republican said that not prosecuting Trump, if it were warranted, would be a “much graver constitutional threat” for the United States. Trump, a Republican, lost to Democrat Joe Biden, but to this day claims that vote-counting irregularities cost him a second four-year term in the White House.  

In an interview last Wednesday that was broadcast Sunday on the “This Week” show, Cheney said that “if a president can engage in these kinds of activities, and the majority of the president’s party looks away; or we as a country decide we’re not actually going to take our constitutional obligations seriously, I think that’s a much, a much more serious threat” than prosecuting him.

“I really believe we have to make these decisions, as difficult as it is, apart from politics. We really have to think about these from the perspective of: What does it mean for the country?” she said.

“There’s no question that he engaged in high crimes and misdemeanors. I think there’s no question that it’s the most serious betrayal of his oath of office of any president in the history of the nation. It’s the most dangerous behavior of any president in the history of the nation,” she said.

Asked whether the committee could make a referral to the Justice Department for prosecution of Trump and others, Cheney said, “Yes,” while adding that the Justice Department “doesn’t have to wait” for the panel to act. She said the committee could issue “more than one criminal referral,” including for possible witness tampering by former Trump aides trying to influence witnesses to stay loyal to Trump as he weighs a campaign to try to reclaim the presidency in the 2024 election.

The Justice Department is in the midst of an ongoing wide-ranging investigation of the riot but has not said it is specifically targeting Trump.

Cheney offered her thoughts a day after she led two hours of questioning Tuesday of Cassidy Hutchinson, a former top aide to Trump’s last White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.

Hutchinson, 25, gave an explosive behind-the-scenes account of Meadows’s and Trump’s actions before and during the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by about 2,000 Trump supporters.

She told lawmakers how Trump became angrier and more volatile as the reality of his election loss set in and he realized that despite his private and public entreaties, former Vice President Mike Pence would not agree to upend the election outcome and send the results in several key states Trump narrowly lost back to their state legislatures so they would name electors supporting Trump to replace those legitimately chosen to vote for Biden in the Electoral College.

She testified that Trump was told ahead of a rally near the White House before the riot at the Capitol unfolded that some of his supporters were armed and equipped with body armor and yet urged them to “fight like hell” to upend the election outcome.

She said that a Meadows aide told her that Trump was angered that his Secret Service security detail would not drive him to the Capitol where his supporters were massing before storming into the Capitol. In one moment disputed by the Secret Service, Hutchinson said Trump tried to grab the steering wheel from a security agent and demanded he be driven to the Capitol.

As some of the rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence!” — she said Meadows told her that Trump approved of the sentiment, saying his No.2 in command deserved to be hanged. Some unknown Trump supporters had erected a gallows on the National Mall within eyesight of the Capitol.  

Trump has worked to disparage Hutchinson’s testimony, posting on social media that “I hardly know who this person … is, other than I heard very negative things about her.”

“She is bad news!” he added.

In the ABC interview, Cheney said she was “absolutely confident” about Hutchinson’s testimony, saying, “She’s an incredibly brave young woman.”In the United States, presidents are effectively chosen in separate elections in each of the 50 states, not through the national popular vote. Each state’s number of electoral votes is dependent on its population, with the biggest states holding the most sway. The rioters who stormed the Capitol tried to keep lawmakers from certifying Biden’s eventual 306-232 victory in the Electoral College.     

At the heart of Trump’s effort to stay in power was an audacious plan espoused by a key Trump lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and conservative lawyer John Eastman, to get legislatures in states Trump narrowly lost to appoint new electors supporting him to replace the official ones favoring Biden. 

While the House committee cannot bring criminal charges, the Department of Justice is closely monitoring the hearings to determine whether anyone, Trump included, should be charged with illegally trying to reverse the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.  

No U.S. president has ever been charged with a criminal offense after leaving office.

Trump has often derided the nine-member House of Representatives panel investigating the riot at the Capitol and attacked its witnesses who have painted a highly unfavorable account of his postelection pressure campaign to stay in office against repeated findings of his own key aides, including former Attorney General William Barr, that there was no evidence of fraud sufficient to overturn the election outcome.

The investigative panel is comprised of seven Democrats, Cheney and another vocal Republican critic of Trump, Congressman Adam Kinzinger.  

Cheney said, “I think you will continue to see in the coming days and weeks additional detail about the president’s activities and behavior” on January 6 last year.  

In one of the hearings set for later this month, the committee is exploring how Trump watched the riot unfold on television for more than three hours while rejecting pleas from aides and his elder daughter, Ivanka, a White House adviser to him, to publicly urge to rioters to leave the Capitol.

More than 800 of them have been arrested and more than 300 have pleaded guilty to an array of criminal charges or been convicted at trials and handed prison terms of a few weeks to more than four years.
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The marshal of the U.S. Supreme Court has asked Maryland and Virginia officials to enforce laws she says prohibit picketing outside the homes of the justices who live in the two states.

“For weeks on end, large groups of protesters chanting slogans, using bullhorns, and banging drums have picketed Justices’ homes,” Marshal Gail Curley wrote in the Friday letters to Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and two local elected officials.

Curley wrote that Virginia and Maryland laws and a Montgomery County, Maryland, ordinance prohibit picketing at justices’ homes, and she asked the officials to direct police to enforce those provisions.

Justices’ homes have been the target of abortion rights protests since May, when a leaked draft opinion suggested the court was poised to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade case that legalized abortion nationwide.

The protests and threatening activities have “increased since May,” Curley wrote in a letter, and have continued since the court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade was issued last week.

“Earlier this week, for example, 75 protesters loudly picketed at one Justice’s home in Montgomery County for 20-30 minutes in the evening, then proceeded to picket at another Justice’s home for 30 minutes, where the crowd grew to 100, and finally returned to the first Justice’s home to picket for another 20 minutes,” Curley wrote in her letter to Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich. “This is exactly the kind of conduct that the Maryland and Montgomery County laws prohibit.”

In her letter to Jeffrey McKay, chairman of the Fairfax County board of supervisors, she said one recent protest outside an unspecified justice’s home involved dozens of people chanting, “no privacy for us, no peace for you!”

The letters from Curley were dated Friday and shared with reporters by a spokesperson for the Supreme Court on Saturday.

Curley’s request came about a month after a California man was found with a gun, knife and pepper spray near the Maryland home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after telling police he was planning to kill the justice. The man, Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., has been charged with attempting to murder a justice of the United States and has pleaded not guilty.

Youngkin and Hogan, both Republicans, have both previously expressed concerns about the protests. In May, they sent a joint letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking for federal law enforcement resources to keep the justices safe and enforce a federal law they said prohibits picketing with the intent to influence a judge.

Hogan spokesperson Michael Ricci said in a statement Saturday that the governor had directed state police to “further review enforcement options that respect the First Amendment and the Constitution.” He also said that “had the marshal taken time to explore the matter,” she would have learned that the constitutionality of the Maryland statute she cited has been questioned by the state Attorney General’s Office.

Elrich said he had no recording of having received the letter addressed to him and questioned why it was released to the press. He said he would review it and was willing to discuss it with Curley but defended the job Montgomery County Police have done so far.

“In Montgomery County we are following the law that provides security and respects the First Amendment rights of protestors. That is what we do, regardless of the subject of the protests,” he said.

Youngkin spokesperson Christian Martinez said the Virginia governor welcomed the marshal’s request and said Youngkin had made the same request of McKay in recent weeks.

“The Governor remains in regular contact with the justices themselves and holds their safety as an utmost priority. He is in contact with state and local officials on the Marshal’s request for assistance and will continue to engage on the issue of the Justice’s safety,” Martinez said.

Youngkin in May pushed for a security perimeter around the homes of justices living in Fairfax County, but McKay rebuffed that request, saying it would infringe on First Amendment protest rights. Youngkin also attempted to create a new felony penalty for certain actions during demonstrations aimed at judges or other officers of a court, which state lawmakers rejected.

A spokesperson for McKay said he was working on a response to the letter.
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Ukrainian-born Karina Lipsman is running for a seat in the US House. VOA’s Yurii Mamon has the story, narrated by Anna Rice.
Camera: Kostiantyn Golubchyk
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Lawmakers investigating the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol last year are signaling they could send referrals to the Justice Department for prosecution of illegal tampering with witnesses who have testified to the panel.

Representative Liz Cheney, vice chairperson of the House of Representatives investigative panel, displayed Tuesday two messages from notes sent to hearing witnesses saying that former President Donald Trump was keeping a close eye on the hearings and was counting on continued loyalty. The senders of the notes weren’t identified.

The panel is probing how the insurrection unfolded and Trump’s role in trying to upend his 2020 reelection defeat.

Cheney’s disclosure of the notes came after two hours of explosive testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, the former top assistant to Mark Meadows, who was Trump’s last White House chief of staff.

Hutchinson described in detail how Trump became angry and volatile in the last weeks of his presidency as the reality of his loss to Democrat Joe Biden sank in and his own associates dismissed his repeated claims that he had been cheated out of reelection.

CNN quoted unidentified sources Thursday saying Hutchinson was one of the witnesses who had been contacted by someone attempting to influence her testimony.

In an interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show Thursday, Cheney said the attempted influencing of witnesses is “very serious. It really goes to the heart of our legal system. And it’s something the committee will certainly be reviewing.”

She added, “It gives us a real insight into how people around the former president are operating, into the extent to which they believe that they can affect the testimony of witnesses before the committee. And it’s something we take very seriously, and it’s something that people should be aware of. It’s a very serious issue, and I would imagine the Department of Justice would be very interested in, and would take that very seriously, as well.”

At Tuesday’s hearing, Cheney did not say which of the committee’s witnesses had been contacted but displayed two text messages on a large television screen.

One said, “What they said to me is as long as I continue to be a team player, they know I’m on the team, I’m doing the right thing, I’m protecting who I need to protect, you know, I’ll continue to stay in good graces in Trump World.”

“And they have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts and just to keep that in mind as I proceed through my depositions and interviews with the committee,” that witness continued.

In another example, a second witness said, “[A person] let me know you have your deposition tomorrow. He wants me to let you know that he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re loyal, and you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”

Representative Zoe Lofgren, another member of the investigative panel, told CNN, “It’s a concern, and anyone who is trying to dissuade or tamper with witnesses should be on notice that that’s a crime, and we are perfectly prepared to provide any evidence we have to the proper authorities.”

A third committee member, Representative Jamie Raskin, said after the hearing, “It’s a crime to tamper with witnesses. It’s a form of obstructing justice. The committee won’t tolerate it. And we haven’t had a chance to fully investigate or fully discuss it, but it’s something we want to look into.”
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Shortly after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion to end women’s constitutional right to abortion, Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt appeared on Fox News suggesting Native American tribes in his state, looking to get around Oklahoma’s tough new abortion ban, might “set up abortion on demand” on any of the 39 Indian reservations in that state.

“You know, the tribes in Oklahoma are super liberal,” Stitt said, “They go to Washington, D.C. They talk to President (Joe) Biden at the White House. They kind of adopt those strategies.”

The U.S. government recognizes tribes as sovereign nations, and as such, have the right to pass their own laws regulating abortion on tribal land, subject to certain limitations.

Stitt’s comments set off wide speculation in the press and in social media about whether abortion seekers could turn to Indian tribes for abortion services in states where the procedure is or soon will be banned now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned.

Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called on the White House to open up federal land and resources to provide reproductive health services. Neither lawmaker referenced Indian reservations, nor have tribes suggested any interest in opening abortion havens.

“It’s been journalists. It’s been activists looking for some sort of a solution,” said Stacy Leeds, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma and a law professor at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law in Arizona. “And now in the last couple of days, it has started to escalate, with politicians almost warning tribes that they better not do this.”

Tuesday, the White House ruled out the possibility of using federal lands for abortion services.

But that hasn’t stopped the conversation in social media.

It is a conversation, however, that most Native Americans find problematic, if not downright offensive.

“Any time there’s a call for tribes to do something that is not originating in their own thought processes, it very much just reeks of further colonization,” said Leeds. “You know, the outsider trying to tell a local tribal government what their law and policy ought to be.”

Native Americans find the conversation particularly upsetting given a well-documented history of sexual violence against Indigenous women that ranged from rape and trafficking to forced sterilizations in the 1970s.

“And you also have this history of the wholesale removal of Native children away from their families and communities to boarding schools or being adopted out to other communities. It’s just traumatic for a lot of people,” Leeds said.

In its 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion, but that didn’t guarantee all women had access. The 1976 Hyde Amendment, which was amended several times in later years, prohibits federal money being used to pay for abortions except in cases of rape, incest or endangerment to the woman’s life. The Indian Health Service relies on federal funds and is the only health care provider available for many Native communities.

To look to tribes for abortion services is to assume Native Americans are a left-leaning monolith, Leeds said.

“Politically, (Native) people are all over the place. You know, it’s a large leap to just automatically presume that everybody would want this,” she said. “And a lot of tribal spiritual traditions hold life as sacred from beginning to the end.”

In 2010, for example, the Navajo Nation Supreme Court ruled on a case involving the death of an unborn fetus in a highway collision, saying, “We take judicial notice that the child, even the unborn child, occupies a space in Navajo culture that can best be described as holy or sacred, although neither of these words convey the child’s status accurately. The child is awę́ę́ t’áá’íídą́ą́’hiną́, alive at conception, and develops perfectly in the care of the mother.”

Native Americans have been given few opportunities to voice their opinions on abortion. One exception is a 2020 study by the Southwest Women’s Law Center and the nonprofit Forward Together that surveyed Native American women on and off reservations in New Mexico — a state where abortions remain legal and available, even after the recent Supreme Court ruling.

When asked whether they would support or oppose a law that would criminalize doctors performing abortions, 45% of respondents said they would oppose it; 25% said they would support it, and 27% said they did not have a strong opinion one way or the other.

“Most of the Native women who are speaking out nationally are upset about the Supreme Court’s latest decision,” Leeds said. “But I don’t see any of them advocating that their communities then become the saviors of everyone else’s communities.”

Tribes are sovereign nations and have the right to pass their own laws regulating abortion on tribal land territories. But criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country is complex; whether tribal governments, state governments or the federal government has jurisdiction depends on the nature of the crime, the identity of the perpetrator and victim, and where the crime takes place.

In theory, tribes could perform abortions, said Leeds, but only in tribally funded facilities on Native patients by Native practitioners. Anyone else could be subject to state or federal law.

“And that’s the galling piece of this whole conversation,” Leeds said. “You want tribes to take this risk for you that might negatively impact their whole world indefinitely? People just don’t understand what they are truly asking.”

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that Oklahoma will be allowed to prosecute non-Native Americans for crimes committed on reservations when the victim is Native, a decision that cuts back on the court’s 2020 ruling that a large chunk of eastern Oklahoma — about 43% of the state — remains an Indian reservation.

Stitt celebrated the decision.

“Today, our efforts proved worthwhile, and the court upheld that Indian country is part of a state, not separate from it,” Stitt said.

Oklahoma in May passed the Nation’s toughest abortion ban. Wednesday’s ruling reduces the likelihood of any tribal abortion haven in that state.
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Nearly three months after she won confirmation to the Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson is officially becoming a justice.

Jackson, 51, will be sworn as the court’s 116th justice Thursday, just as the man she is replacing, Justice Stephen Breyer, retires.

The judicial pas de deux is set to take place at noon, the moment Breyer said in a letter to President Joe Biden on Wednesday that his retirement will take effect after nearly 28 years on the nation’s highest court.

The court is expected to issue its final opinions earlier Thursday in a momentous and rancorous term that included overturning Roe v. Wade’s guarantee of the right to an abortion. The remaining cases are a challenge to the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate climate-warming emissions from power plants, and Biden’s bid to end the Trump-era “remain in Mexico” asylum program.

In a ceremony the court said it will stream live on its website, Jackson will recite two oaths required of Supreme Court justices, one administered by Breyer and the other by Chief Justice John Roberts.

Jackson, a federal judge since 2013, will be the first Black woman to serve as a justice. She will be joining three women, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett — the first time four women will serve together on the nine-member court.

Biden nominated Jackson in February, a month after Breyer, 83, announced he would retire at the end of the court’s term, assuming his successor had been confirmed. Breyer’s earlier-than-usual announcement and the condition he attached was a recognition of the Democrats’ tenuous hold on the Senate in an era of hyper-partisanship, especially surrounding federal judgeships.

The Senate confirmed Jackson’s nomination in early April, by a 53-47 mostly party-line vote that included support from three Republicans.

She has been in a sort of judicial limbo ever since, remaining a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., but not hearing any cases. Biden elevated her to that court from the district judgeship to which she was appointed by President Barack Obama.

Jackson will be able to begin work immediately, but the court will have just finished the bulk of its work until the fall, apart from emergency appeals that occasionally arise. That will give her time to settle in and familiarize herself with the roughly two dozen cases the court already has agreed to hear starting in October as well as hundreds of appeals that will pile up over the summer.
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The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection issued a subpoena Wednesday to former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who is said to have stridently warned against former President Donald Trump’s efforts to try to overturn his election loss.

It’s the first public step the committee has taken since receiving the public testimony of Cassidy Hutchinson, the onetime junior aide who accused Trump of knowing his supporters were armed on Jan. 6 and demanding that he be taken to the U.S. Capitol that day.

Cipollone, who was Trump’s top White House lawyer, is said to have raised concerns about the former president’s efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and at one point threatened to resign. The committee said he could have information about several efforts by Trump allies to subvert the Electoral College, from organizing so-called alternate electors in states Biden won to trying to appoint as attorney general a loyalist who pushed false theories of voter fraud.

Cipollone has been placed in key moments after the election by Hutchinson as well as by former Justice Department lawyers who appeared for a hearing the week before.

Hutchinson said Cipollone warned before Jan. 6 that there would be “serious legal concerns” if Trump went to the Capitol with the protesters expected to rally outside.

The morning of Jan. 6, she testified, Cipollone restated his concerns that if Trump did go to the Capitol to try to intervene in the certification of the election, “we’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable.”

And as the insurrection went on, she says she heard Meadows tell Cipollone that Trump was sympathetic to rioters wanting to hang then-Vice President Mike Pence.

“You heard it,” Meadows told Cipollone, in her recollection. “He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.”

Reps. Bennie Thompson, a Democrat, and Liz Cheney, a Republican, the chairman and vice chairman of the committee, said in their letter to Cipollone that while he had given the committee an “informal interview” on April 13, his refusal to provide on-the-record testimony made their subpoena necessary.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican who sits on the committee, said last week that Cipollone told the committee he tried to intervene when he heard Trump was being advised by Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who wanted to push false claims of voter fraud. Federal agents recently seized Clark’s cell phone and conducted a search of his Virginia home.

Clark had drafted a letter for key swing states that was never sent but would have falsely claimed the department had discovered troubling irregularities in the election. Cipollone was quoted by one witness as having told Trump the letter was a “murder-suicide pact.”
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