News Roundup: 187 Minutes

Thursday’s hearing of the Jan. 6 committee focused on perhaps the biggest question about that afternoon: what Trump was doing while the U.S. Capitol was under attack by his supporters.

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Thursday’s hearing of the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection focused on perhaps the biggest question about that afternoon: what former President Trump was doing for the 187 minutes that the U.S. Capitol was under attack by his supporters.

“President Trump did not fail to act,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who led the hearing with fellow military veteran Rep. Elaine Luria. “He chose not to act.” The committee walked through a timeline of those 187 minutes, juxtaposing disturbing footage of the violence — including video showcasing the rioters’ obedience to Trump’s directions — with Trump’s continued inaction and his incendiary tweets.

Before the hearing, American Oversight updated our detailed, minute-by-minute timeline of the events of Jan. 6 with new records of communications we obtained from the Justice Department. They include an email sent at 4:01 p.m. that day stating that Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy “has not released the [D.C. National Guard] to assist.” The National Guard did not arrive at the Capitol until 5:40.
Trump refused to call off the rioters despite pleas from top advisers, family members, and even members of Congress who were under siege. Instead, he remained in front of the television.
He made no calls to law enforcement or any national security agency. The afternoon’s White House call logs and presidential diary were blank. But the committee said he had called a number of senators during that time to urge them to delay or object to the certification of electoral votes.
Members of Vice President Pence’s security detail feared for their lives. “A lot of very personal calls over the radio, so it was disturbing,” an anonymous White House security official told the committee. “I don’t like talking about it, but there were calls to say goodbye to family members, so on and so forth.”
The committee also highlighted the fears and condemnations of Republican leaders — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — in the immediate aftermath of the attack. (They also contrasted Sen. Josh Hawley’s encouragement of the mob earlier in the day with footage of him quickly fleeing the Senate floor.)
Trump was also keen to avoid statements that veered from praise for his supporters. He resisted using the word “peace” in a tweet to his supporters. In the infamous video message in which he told the rioters they were “very special,” he did not say the scripted line that would call on them to go home. And in video outtakes from the address Trump gave the next day, he said, “I don’t want to say the election is over.”

Of course, even today Trump and many of his supporters still refuse to acknowledge that the election is over.

The Arizona Republican Party censured state House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who provided public testimony in the June 21 select committee hearing about his refusal to help Trump overturn his loss in the state.
A coalition of far-right sheriffs has partnered with voter-fraud alarmist group True the Vote to investigate the 2020 election.
True the Vote also has deep ties to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a vocal supporter of Trump’s election lies.
Voter-fraud activists in Pennsylvania are now targeting nursing home administrators.
Election skepticism continues to infect this year’s elections, with several Georgia counties seeking audits of this year’s primary results.
Last week, Trump again called Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to urge him to “decertify” the 2020 election, a legally impossible action that election deniers in the state are still calling for.

American Oversight Legal Victories Exposing the Big Lie

In our ongoing legal fight for records from the partisan election investigation Vos launched last year, a Wisconsin court ruled that Vos had violated the state’s public records law and ordered him to respond to our records requests within 20 days.

The judge wrote that Vos “not only untimely delayed responses to records requests, but that his responses have also failed to include countless records, either willfully or because of neglectful office-wide practices which might have caused the loss of records.”
Meanwhile in Arizona, the Superior Court of Maricopa County ordered the state Senate and contractor Cyber Ninjas to immediately release to us documents related to the partisan “audit” of the 2020 election. This was the first time the court directly ordered Cyber Ninjas to release records in response to our litigation.

The Coronavirus Pandemic

President Biden tested positive for Covid-19 on Thursday, with the White House saying he was experiencing mild symptoms. His diagnosis comes as the nation faces a rapidly spreading surge. And unreported tests and a hands-off approach to managing the virus are leaving communities with little sense of the wave’s magnitude and few protective measures, setting the stage for future variants to develop.

The Biden administration’s planned reorganization of the Department of Health and Human Services would elevate the office of the assistant secretary for preparedness and response to effectively the same level as the CDC and FDA.
Anthony Fauci said he plans to retire by the end of Biden’s current term.
The CDC stopped reporting Covid-19 cases on cruise ships this week.
The federal government launched a new website hosting data on how states and localities are spending American Rescue Plan relief money, but the interface is missing key details, according to the COVID Stimulus Watch project.

Daily averages of case counts, hospitalizations, and deaths are all steadily rising.

Nurse staffing shortages are worsening the impacts of the pandemic on hospitals.
Florida parents are struggling to get their children under 5 vaccinated, and many of them are blaming Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration’s vaccine skepticism.
Federal regulators fined Bank of America $225 million for mistakenly freezing customers’ accounts, cutting off their access to unemployment benefits and pandemic relief money.
Deaths from synthetic opioid overdoses increased significantly during the pandemic across all groups, but especially among Black and Native American populations.

On the Records

No Records of Evidence — or “Gut Feeling”
In June, the county commission in New Mexico’s Otero County — citing baseless concerns about voting machines — refused to certify the results of the primary election. Even after the state supreme court ordered the commission to do so, Commissioner Couy Griffin still dissented, saying his vote wasn’t based on “any evidence” or “any facts,” but rather on his “gut feeling.”

We asked Otero County for records of any materials commissioners used to come to their decision not to certify the vote. But a county employee told us they found no responsive records — which certainly backs up Griffin’s claim of having no evidence.

Former N.C. Supreme Court Justice’s Support for Election-Overturning Lawsuit
The New York Times reported that among those encouraging Trump’s crusade to overturn his election loss was a little-known conservative lawyer named William Olson, who in late December 2020 sent Trump a memo outlining a plan to use the Justice Department to take an election-challenging case to the Supreme Court. Olson mentioned that former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Mark Martin had also spoken with Trump about the scheme.

We obtained records, reported on by Talking Points Memo, showing that Martin had been an active supporter of the lawsuit, Texas v. Pennsylvania, pushed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.
Other documents we obtained, previously also reported on by TPM, showed that South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson had been in touch with Martin just days before Wilson announced South Carolina would join Paxton’s lawsuit.

News Roundup: 187 Minutes

American Oversight Legal Victories Exposing the Big Lie

The Coronavirus Pandemic

On the Records

Other Stories We’re Following

Jan. 6

The Big Lie

In the States

National News

Voting Rights

Immigration