News Roundup: Two Years After the Jan. 6 Attack

With the new year, the House select committee investigating the attack of Jan. 6, 2021 — two years ago today — has wrapped up its work.

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With the new year, the House select committee investigating the attack of Jan. 6, 2021 — which took place two years ago today — has wrapped up its work.

Over the last two weeks, the committee released a trove of interview transcripts, communications, and other documents that, as the New York Times wrote, “touched on nearly every aspect of Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the 2020 election” and “provided new details about how some of his top allies lobbied for aggressive plans to keep him in power.” Here are just some of the revelations from recent weeks:

White House call logs show several contacts with top Justice Department officials on Jan. 3, as Trump sought to install loyalist Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general. We previously obtained text messages sent that same day by DOJ officials who threatened to resign if Trump carried out the plan. “Justice is our client,” said one top official.
Ginni Thomas, a conservative activist and wife of Justice Clarence Thomas, told the committee that she thought “there’s still a lot of things that are still being uncovered,” but admitted she didn’t have any “specific evidence.”
Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he first spoke with Trump about the election in August 2021, after Vos launched the partisan — and pricey — election inquiry headed by conservative lawyer Michael Gableman. As the Washington Post noted, “Trump’s approach was far different in Georgia, Arizona and Michigan, where he pressed Republican officials to try to reverse the results in the weeks after the election.”
Testimony also highlighted the confusion over the deployment of National Guard units to the Capitol, including a disagreement about when the Pentagon finally approved the deployment. (See our timeline for a minute-by-minute account of that day, based on key documents and communications.)

The fake electors scheme remained a central pillar of Trump’s effort to overturn his loss, and the committee released transcripts of several key allies who were involved in the plot.

According to the former chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party, Sen. Ron Johnson called him in December 2020 advocating for the state’s Republican lawmakers to choose the state’s presidential electors, instead of voters.
Texts from that same month show Sen. Mike Lee asked Trump campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell if there were “any chance we will see competing slates of electors named” by state legislatures, but later expressed reservations about the fake electors plan for Jan. 6, calling it a “dangerous idea.”
During her testimony, Mitchell expressed support for the radical independent state legislature theory, which says that state lawmakers have the final say on administering federal elections — and in Mitchell’s view, even choosing electors. Read about our investigation into support for that fringe legal theory here, and into Mitchell’s nomination to the federal Election Assistance Commission’s advisory board here.

On the Records

The Atlantic’s Family Separation Archive
The Atlantic published an archive of internal government documents — including records obtained by American Oversight — related to the Trump administration’s zero-tolerance initiative, the policy that formalized the separation of children from families.

The collection provides examples of the government’s disorganized record-keeping and attempts to hide the policy’s impacts from the public, and includes documents we featured in our own extensive timeline of records related to family separation.
We recently wrote about records from the Trump administration Department of Homeland Security that provide further evidence of problems with detention capacity and failures to properly track children separated from their families.
We also obtained records last month that contain complaints and allegations of abuse filed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol officers.

Florida’s Migrant Transportation Flights
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ public safety adviser, Larry Keefe, used a private email address to help his former legal client, Vertol Systems Company, obtain a contract to run the state’s Sept. 14 flights relocating migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard.

American Oversight has previously obtained text messages between Keefe and the company’s CEO, James Montgomerie. A few days before the flights, Montgomerie texted Keefe about potential plans to send as many as 50 migrants to Delaware and expressed optimism about efforts to recruit more migrants to send on the trips, writing, “The network has grown exponentially!”
We’ve obtained communications between other key figures behind the controversial migrant transportation efforts as well as contract documents and terms of agreement between the Florida Department of Transportation and Vertol Systems.

News Roundup: Two Years After the Jan. 6 Attack

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