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They need to put a law in for that just in case someone else pops up like himFearing a Trump Repeat, Jan. 6 Panel Considers Changes to Insurrection Act
WASHINGTON — In the days before the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, some of President Donald Trump’s most extreme allies and members of right-wing militia groups urged him to use his power as commander in chief to unleash the military to help keep him in office.
Now, as the House committee investigating last year’s riot uncovers new evidence about the lengths to which Trump was willing to go to cling to power, some lawmakers on the panel have quietly begun discussions about rewriting the Insurrection Act, the 1807 law that gives presidents wide authority to deploy the military within the United States to respond to a rebellion.
The discussions are preliminary, and debate over the act has been fraught in the aftermath of Trump’s presidency. Proponents envision a doomsday scenario in which a rogue future president might try to use the military to stoke — rather than put down — an insurrection, or to abuse protesters. But skeptics worry about depriving a president of the power to quickly deploy armed troops in the event of an uprising, as presidents did during the Civil War and the civil rights era.
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While Trump never invoked the law, he threatened to do so in 2020 to have the military crack down on crowds protesting the police killing of George Floyd. Stephen Miller, one of his top advisers, also proposed putting it into effect to turn back migrants at the southwestern border, an idea that was rejected by the defense secretary at the time, Mark Esper.
And as Trump grasped for ways to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, some hard-right advisers encouraged him to declare martial law and deploy U.S. troops to seize voting machines. In the runup to the Jan. 6 attack, members of right-wing militia groups also encouraged Trump to invoke the law, believing that he was on the brink of giving them approval to descend on Washington with weapons to fight on his behalf.
“There are many of us who are of the view that the Insurrection Act, which the former president threatened to invoke multiple times throughout 2020, bears a review,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., a member of the Jan. 6 committee.
While no evidence has emerged that Trump planned to invoke the act to stay in office, people close to him were pushing for him to do so. Michael T. Flynn, Trump’s first national security adviser, attended a meeting in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, in which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency and invoking certain national security emergency powers. That meeting came after Flynn gave an interview to right-wing television network Newsmax in which he talked about a purported precedent for deploying troops and declaring martial law to “rerun” the election.
The idea was also floated by Roger Stone, the political operative and longtime confidant of Trump, who told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones in an interview that Trump should consider invoking the Insurrection Act.
In the weeks before the riot, the notion was prevalent among militia members and other hard-right supporters of Trump. It has surfaced repeatedly in evidence that federal prosecutors and the House committee have obtained during their investigations into the Capitol attack.
In December 2020, Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers militia group, wrote an open letter to Trump in which he called on the president to “use the Insurrection Act to ‘stop the steal,’” begin seizing voting data and order a new election.
“Clearly, an unlawful combination and conspiracy in multiple states (indeed, in every state) has acted to deprive the people of the fundamental right to vote for their representatives in a clear, fair election,” Rhodes wrote, adding, “You, and you alone, are fully authorized by the Insurrection Act to determine that such a situation exists and to use the U.S. military and militia to rectify that situation.”
In text messages and social media posts before the Capitol riot, other Oath Keepers members also discussed the possibility of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act. Two of them, Jessica Watkins and Kelly Meggs, the head of the militia’s Florida chapter, have been charged in connection with the attack.
And Rhodes sent armed men to a hotel in Virginia on Jan. 6 to await Trump’s order, which the militia leader said would nullify Washington gun restrictions and allow the group to take up arms and fight for the president.
The House committee, which has interviewed more than 850 witnesses, is charged with writing an authoritative report about the events that led to the violence of Jan. 6 and coming up with legislative recommendations to try to protect American democracy from a repeat. Although the committee's recommendations are likely to garner widespread attention, they are not guaranteed to become law.
One such recommendation is almost certainly to be an overhaul of the Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election. In recent weeks, the panel has begun discussing whether to call for revisions to the Insurrection Act, which empowers the president to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”
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Fearing a Trump Repeat, Jan. 6 Panel Considers Changes to Insurrection Act (yahoo.com)
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you got a source LB?Looks like they got quite a few questions for the goofy once Trump doctor now Congressman Ronnie Jackson....shit from an oath keeper encrypted communication that said that he needed protection.... for the data he had
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Deadline Whitehouse was talking about it in their opening.... and I'm sure that Ari Melber will be talking about it, as well as Maddow an O'Donnelyou got a source LB?
thanks dawg@dbluesun ..Oath Keeper encrypted messages
User 1 (3:00pm): Ronnie Jackson(TX) office inside Capitol-he needs Oath Keepers help. Anyone inside?
User 2(3:03pm): Hopefully they can help Dr. Jackson
User 1(3:08pm): Dr, Ronnie Jackson-on the move. Needs protection. If anyone inside cover him. He has critical data to protect.
Stewart Rhodes(3:10pm): Give him my cell.
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Evidence doesn't matter. Even with receipts, hard black and white documents, audio, and video evidence the GOP will laugh and call it a fake news which hunt. Their supporters just don't care about the insurrection, because it failed. And the DOJ is useless.If they subpoena you they have evidence