TrickJarrett.com

"I Photographed January 6. Trump’s Pardons Can’t Erase What I Saw."

This is why I document: America loves to rebrand its sins as myth. In four years, MAGA loyalists have rewritten January 6 from every angle. Rioters have been framed as leftists in disguise, police as “crisis actors,” the attack an FBI setup—or, more outrageously, citizens on a “normal tourist visit.” By 2025, revisionism is big business. Conservative media churns out books, podcasts, and stump speeches recasting insurrection as resurrection. But my images tell another story: they depict a nation in fracture, where well-meaning neighbors and dutiful relatives cling to their “Big Lie” with an unwavering sincerity that doesn’t just reject facts—it inoculates against them, leaving everyone vulnerable to propaganda and less capable of critical thought.

"Biden pardons Fauci, Milley and members of Jan. 6 panel"

It's no surprise that America is so broken that it has come to this. The next four years are going to be terrible for so many people. Having reached a point where this became necessary is very telling as the last act before the transition.

"The Jan. 6 Riot Inquiry So Far: Three Years, Hundreds of Prison Sentences"

An interactive article on NYT about the progress of the cases against January 6th rioters. It has animations as you scroll to provide visuals for data points, helping give context to the numbers it rattles off.

As of December, about 1,240 people had been arrested in connection with the attack, accused of crimes ranging from trespassing, a misdemeanor, to seditious conspiracy, a felony.

Around 170 people have been convicted at trial, while only two people have been fully acquitted. Approximately 710 people have pleaded guilty …

"You’re Telling Me That Thing Is Forged?"

I forget the name of the book I read, but it was discussing the absurdity that was the Trump regime and how inept they were at actually running the country. It was in that book that I was first introduced to John McEntee. The linked article recounts a bit more about John. This first excerpt captures what had been highlighted in the book, which was the absolute absurd levels of loyalty which were required by that regime. The second one was new to me and absolutely wild to read about.

Edit: Ah yes, the book I was trying to think of was Michael Lewis' The Fifth Risk.

Johnny McEntee was just twenty‑five years old when he volunteered to work on the Trump campaign in 2015. He didn't have much experience—he was a production assistant on the news desk at Fox News at the time—but he was eager, confident, and willing to work hard. Most importantly, he loved Donald Trump. A former quarterback at the University of Connecticut, he achieved short-lived internet fame in 2011 when a video of him throwing trick passes went viral. Trump liked having him around and soon made him his personal assistant, taking him along whenever he traveled. As the campaign ramped up, he became Trump's "body guy," carrying the candidate's bags and relaying messages.

McEntee reprised the role in the White House after the 2016 election, but was fired in early 2018 by then-chief of staff John Kelly when a background check turned up a serious gambling habit that was considered to pose a national security risk. He didn't leave for long, though. After Kelly himself was fired, McEntee returned to the White House in February 2020.

His second stint in the administration proved to be more consequential. McEntee resumed his role as Trump's body guy with a seat just outside the Oval Office, but he was also named director of the Presidential Personnel Office, which is responsible for the vetting, hiring, and firing of the four thousand political appointees who serve in the executive branch. McEntee may have never hired or fired anybody before in his life, but he was fiercely loyal—and for Trump, that made him the perfect choice for the job.

McEntee's efforts to root out Trump infidels in the administration were often comically petty, but they came with the force of a presidential mandate. Just weeks before the 2020 presidential election, for example, somebody on McEntee's staff discovered that a young woman in the office of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson had liked an Instagram post by pop star Taylor Swift that included a photo of Swift holding a tray of cookies decorated with the Biden-Harris campaign logo. The transgression was brought all the way to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who placed a call to Carson's top aide. The message: We can't have our people liking the social media posts of a high‑profile Biden supporter like Taylor Swift.

Now, this comes out from January 6th investigations, and is mind boggling.

The January 6 Committee's investigation unearthed the extraordinary story of what happened next—but the information didn't make it into any of the committee's hearings or its final report. What follows is based on the sworn testimony of the key players, including McEntee and Macgregor, as well as National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Three days after Macgregor arrived at the Pentagon, he called McEntee and told him he couldn't accomplish any of the items on their handwritten to-do list without a signed order from the president.

"Hey, they're not going to do anything we want, or the president wants, without a directive," Macgregor told him, emphasizing the need for an official White House order signed by Trump. The Pentagon's stonewalling made sense, of course: You don't make major changes to America's global defense posture based on a glorified Post-it note from the president's body guy.

The order, Macgregor added, should focus on the top priority from McEntee's list—Afghanistan—and it had to include a specific date for the complete withdrawal of all uniformed military personnel from the country. He suggested January 31, 2021.

McEntee and an assistant quickly typed up the directive, but they moved the Afghanistan withdrawal timeline up to January 15—just five days before Trump was set to leave office—and added a second mandate: a complete withdrawal of US troops from Somalia by December 31, 2020.

McEntee, of course, didn't know the first thing about drafting a presidential directive—let alone one instructing the movement of thousands of servicemen and -women. He had two jobs in the White House—only one of which he was qualified for—and neither one had anything to do with national security or the military. An order even 10 percent as consequential as the one McEntee was drafting would typically go through the National Security Council with input from the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military commanders in the region. Instead, the guy who usually carried Trump's bags was hammering it out on his computer, consulting with nobody but the retired colonel the president had just hired because he had seen him on cable TV.

The absurdity of the situation was captured in McEntee's interview with the January 6 Committee:

Q: Is it typical for the Presidential Personnel Office to draft orders concerning troop withdrawal?

McEntee: Probably not typical, no.

Because they were so out of their depth, McEntee and his assistant ended up reaching out to Macgregor again—they didn't know how to arrange the document they were working on. "I was called on the phone by one of McEntee's staffers who was having trouble formatting the order and getting the language straight," Macgregor recalled. The retired colonel told the thirty-year-old staffer to open a cabinet, find an old presidential decision memorandum, and copy it.

Easy enough. The duo wrote up the order, had the president sign it, and sent it over to Kash Patel, the new acting defense secretary's chief of staff.

Chaos ensued.

Trump promises conclusive evidence of stolen election

All it took was George's grand jury indictment to get him to finally reveal the truth.

"Trump charged in probe of Jan. 6, efforts to overturn 2020 election"

The article also linked to the 4-page PDF detailing the indictment. The four counts against Trump and unnamed coconspirators.

Not from the article, but pulled from elsewhere, this is the summary of the counts:

• A conspiracy to defraud the United States "by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election," according to the special counsel's office. This count carries a 5-year maximum sentence.
• A conspiracy to impede the Jan. 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified. This count carries a 20-year maximum sentence.
• A conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted. This count carries a 10-year maximum sentence.
• Obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct and impede, the certification of the electoral vote. This count carries a 20-year maximum sentence.

---

Doing further reading, here is a piece on Politico: Key revelations, groundbreaking strategies and notable omissions in the new Trump indictment

The indictment does not identify any of the six alleged co-conspirators who prosecutors say unlawfully agreed to aid Trump's bid to subvert the election. But five of them were readily identifiable based on the widely known details in the indictment. They are:

1. Rudy Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and the leader of an effort to pressure state legislators to reverse election results.
2. John Eastman, a constitutional lawyer who helped develop the strategy to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election on Jan. 6.
3. Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer who pushed fringe theories about manipulation of voting machines.
4. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who pressed DOJ leaders to sow doubt about the election results.
5. Ken Chesebro, an architect of key elements of Trump's fake elector strategy.

The identity of the sixth alleged co-conspirator, a political consultant, was not immediately verifiable, but the indictment says that person played a role in the effort to assemble false slates of pro-Trump presidential electors in states that Biden won.

The article also highlights the following revelations from the indictment:

• Prosecutors say Trump offered — and Clark accepted — the job of acting attorney general on Jan. 3, 2021. The select committee found phone records listing Clark as "acting attorney general" before Trump rescinded the appointment under the threat of mass resignations from DOJ leaders, but the committee did not confirm that Trump had made the official appointment.
• Prosecutors say that Pat Philbin, Trump's deputy White House counsel, warned Clark that if he and Trump pressed ahead with plans to stay in power past Biden's scheduled inauguration, there would be "riots in the streets" across the country. According to the indictment, Clark responded, "That's why we have an Insurrection Act."
• The indictment reveals that Mike Pence kept contemporaneous notes, including of his conversations with Trump in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6. In one Dec. 29, 2020, conversation, Trump falsely told Pence that the Justice Department had identified "major infractions" in election integrity, prosecutors say.

And the last part, at the end of the article which I found notable. I had considered the second point, but not really the first or third, but seeing them called out here makes me wonder about them as well.

Many of the central details in the indictment tracked closely with the evidence amassed by the Jan. 6 select committee. But large swaths of the committee's probe went unmentioned. Among them:

• The indictment makes no reference to the organization of Trump's Jan. 6 rally or the financing that went into it.
• It omits evidence of Trump's serious consideration of a plan to use federal or military power to seize voting machines from several states in which Trump disputed the outcome.
• It includes no allegations of any links between Trump and the extremist groups who attacked the Capitol or references to others featured by the Jan. 6 committee as key players, like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones.

"It's Time To Learn To Love Procedure and the Nuance of Law"

I follow this blog's author, Teri Kanefield, on Mastodon and quite enjoyed this explanation around the letter Trump received, what it likely means, and more insights into the way this process works.

I particularly enjoyed this section:

Trump’s Trial Schedule

• January 15: The next Jean E. Carroll trial (civil)
• March: Manhattan hush-money case (criminal)
• May: Stolen documents case (criminal)

Plus, we’re expecting two more indictments, one from Georgia and of course, one for the J6 insurrection. You can see that Trump’s 2024 trial dance card is getting full.

Jan. 6 rioter gets 12.5 years for using taser on police officer

Two important things came to mind as I read this:

First, these articles are important, but only if they are being seen by the right people. Showing the ongoing prosecution and jailings of the rioters is great, except the bubbles which now exist mean a lot of people who support it aren't going to see these sentencings.

Second, the convicted rioter is 40 years old. At most 16 months older than me. An elder-millenial like me. Not my parents' generation. Not Gen X. People who grew up in the same world I did.

Four Oath Keepers convicted of seditious conspiracy

Laying more groundwork to begin working up the chain further. Hopefully it keeps going up.

Dan Rather on the eve of the 2-year anniversary of January 6th

It was an attack on the very meaning and security of American democracy orchestrated by a man who had sworn to uphold the Constitution as the chief executive of our nation. Unbelievable. But believable. Buttressed by reams of evidence, including the man's own words and deeds. 

And yet, here we are. Rather than unifying us as a nation, this date and all it represents divides us, weakens us, challenges the confidence we have in what we once believed was inviolable.

The scene of the insurrection — our mighty Capitol — is once more beset by chaos. This time it is coming from within the House, quite literally. But the two events are inextricably linked. For the most part, the rebels of January 2023 are marinated in the same Big Lie and nihilism that fueled the mob in 2021. In fact, many of these congressional office holders were cheerleaders and even participants in the earlier attacks on American democracy we now commemorate.

As shameful as these events are, they are as much a part of who we are as a country in 2023 as "We the people" or "a more perfect union." We cannot afford to look away. These forces of autocracy and the extreme far right might have been tempered in the recent midterm elections, but they were far from vanquished. As we see in the spectacle of choosing a speaker of the House, the chaos is endemic to the current Republican Party. 

"The full January 6 report is out. Here are the key details and recommendations"

The Committee's recommendations boil down to the five points, as laid out in the linked article:

1. Citing the 14th amendment, the committee recommended Trump should be barred from holding federal or state office ever again. They also recommend the creation of a "formal mechanism" to evaluate whether those who took part in the insurrection should be barred from holding future government office on federal and other levels.
2. The committee also recommends that Congress should make stronger criminal penalties for those who obstruct a peaceful transfer of power,
3. And they recommend federal penalties for those who threaten election workers. The committee's investigation found that many of the people who refused to be pushed into manipulating election results, including governors, secretaries of state, state legislators, state and local election officials, and frontline election workers, found themselves subjected to spamming, doxing, harassment, intimidation, and violent threats. Some of those threats were sexualized or racist in nature and targeted family members.
4. The committee subpoenaed several individuals in the process of their investigation, but their authority to enforce those subpoenas is unclear. The committee recommends the creation of new legislation that would enforce House subpoenas in federal court.
5. The committee also recommends more oversight over the Capitol Police. "Congressional committees of jurisdiction should continue regular and rigorous oversight of the United States Capitol Police as it improves its planning, training, equipping, and intelligence processes and practices its critical incident response protocols," they write. They said there should be joint hearings with testimony from the Capitol Police Board.

Other key details in the report mirror the findings of the committee laid out in previous hearings that took place over the last year:

• Trump planned to declare victory regardless of the outcome. The committee lays out how Trump's plan to overturn the 2020 election was not spontaneous, but premeditated.
• Trump was aware of the risk of violence when he called on his supporters to march on the Capitol. The report shows how extremist groups like the Oathkeepers and the Proud Boys banded together for the insurrection. "President Trump had summoned a mob, including armed extremists and conspiracy theorists, to Washington, DC on the same day the joint session of Congress was to meet. He then told that same mob to march on the US Capitol and 'fight.' They clearly got the message," the committee wrote.
• Trump was aware of violence at the Capitol for more than three hours before he agreed to intervene. The report calls this period of time "187 minutes of dereliction," in which they say Trump drank Diet Coke, put off advice from advisers, including his daughter Ivanka, and watched Fox News during the insurrection. The committee laid out a timeline of what happened leading up to and during those three hours, which entailed increasing tension between Trump and Vice President Pence and Trump himself attempting to go to the Capitol to join his supporters.
• Top aides to the president were aware that election fraud investigations would not change the election outcome. The committee argues that Trump and his allies not only lied about election fraud, but ripped-off their supporters by asking for money for lawsuits to fight the election results.

"January 6 committee report’s biggest takeaways and new findings"

Vox does a great summary of what is in the report from the commission. Much of it was already part of their live hearings. There are two things I consider most notable:

1. There is no direct link between Trump and the protesters which gets revealed. There remains enough of a smoke shield that I think the direct insurrection charge is going to be very hard to prove.
2. Hutchinson's first lawyer was defending Trump in trying to defend her, and giving her advice which aided Trump perhaps more than Hutchinson.

Jan. 6 Committee Announces Criminal Referrals

Historic.

Not a direct quote from the article, but the reporting online says these are the individuals named:

Obstruction of an Official Proceeding 18 U.S.C 1512

1. Trump
2. Clark
3. Eastman
4. Chesebro

Conspiracy to Defraud the United States 18 U.S.C 171

1. Trump
2. Eastman
3. Clark
4. Chesebro
5. Meadows
6. Giuliani

Conspiracy to Make a False Statement 18 U.S.C 371, 1001

1. Trump
2. Eastman
3. Chesebro

"Incite," "Assist" or "Aid or Comfort an Insurrection" 18 U.S.C 2383

1. Trump

Both House & Senate have laws with bi-partisan support aimed at closing some of the loopholes around our elections

Article is by a law professor who outlines the four key reforms he sees as needed.

Both the Senate and the House have versions of a bill that tries to achieve the same end. But the Senate bill, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act, is narrower, went through extensive public vetting and has broad bipartisan support. It is likely something very close to this version becomes law.

The Electoral Count Reform Act does many small things, but it does a few big things that deserve public attention for their ability to deter mischief in this important process.

NPR is not having it

Archiving the post text:

BREAKING: Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and inspired a deadly riot at the Capitol in a desperate attempt to keep himself in power, has filed to run for president again in 2024.

Liz Cheney defeated in Wyoming GOP Primary

I have to assume she expected this as a repercussion for doing the right thing with the January 6th commission.

The FBI has Raided Mar-a-Lago

"Exclusive: Jan. 6 Committee Prepares to Subpoena Alex Jones’ Texts, Emails"

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R, IL) gives some very frank insight into the progress of Jan. 6 Subcommittee and calls out the sudden resistance to testify by some individuals

An interesting tidbit from the Axios newsletter:

Nielsen says 17.7 million viewers watched Thursday's hearing — down from the 20 million who watched the other prime-time hearing, on June 9, AP's David Bauder reports.

An estimated 13.6 million of Thursday's hearing viewers — 77% — were age 55+. Only 705,000 viewers were 18 to 34.

The six daytime hearings averaged 11.2 million viewers, with a peak audience of 13.2 million on June 28, when Cassidy Hutchinson testified.

705,000 is 4% of the viewership for Thursday's broadcast. My wife and I fell into the unmentioned 19% that are between 34 and 55.

I had seen the 17.7M viewers number, but only out of context of the viewership of other panel sessions.

Vox's Five Main Takeaways From Yesterday's January 6th Hearing

I only caught the latter half of the hearing but it was still enough to set my blood boiling at the absolutely disgusting filth who was our 45th President.

"DC police officer corroborates story that Trump got in ‘heated argument’ in vehicle on Jan. 6"

While the corroboration doesn't talk at all about lunging for the wheel, it confirms that the President was adamant about going to the Capitol and angry when it was not done.

"January 6 hearing makes it clear: MAGA is a cult"

What the committee hearing on Tuesday made clear is that Trump viewed his supporters as mere instruments in his quest for illegally obtained power. He cared not one whit how much damage he inflicted on his supporters.

"These Americans did not have access to the truth," Cheney said of the Big Lie believers. "They put their faith, their trust, in Donald Trump ... he deceived them."

To be sure, there's a genuine tension there. Painting Trump as a mastermind who knows what he is doing, but portraying his followers — or a good chunk of them, anyway — as mere dupes feels like a contradiction. If the Big Lie is so obviously false that Trump didn't believe it, then why would his followers believe it? Or, conversely, if his followers convinced themselves the Big Lie was real, then why couldn't Trump have done the same? Isn't it simpler to just view Trump and his followers as like-minded liars, people who collectively agree on falsehood in order to achieve their political ends?

Thursday, Prime Time - Be there, be angry

Not prosecuting Trump for Jan. 6 would fuel a 'much graver threat,' Liz Cheney says