Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone Gets Jan 6 Subpoena Like A Common John Eastman
Pony up, asshole.
Last night the House January 6 Select Committee finally dropped a subpoena on former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone ordering him to get his ass in a chair and testify under oath right fuckin' now.
Vice Chair Liz Cheney put Cipollone on blast at the conclusion of every hearing, painting him as a cowardly Goofus, unlike his gallant former colleagues who all ponied up to the witness stand and told the truth. If Rich Donoghue and Jeff Rosen and even Bill Barr can testify on live television about what Trump said in that meeting where that weirdo environmental lawyer Jeff Clark tried to get himself appointed acting attorney general, "Patsy Baloney" can sit for a deposition in the Rayburn conference room.
Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony on Tuesday that Cipollone begged her to keep Trump from marching on the Capitol with the mob because they would get "charged with every crime imaginable" made the need for Cipollone to spill the beans even more clear. Particularly in light of her description of Cipollone desperately begging Mark Meadows to get Trump to call off the mob, saying, "Mark, we need to do something more. They're literally calling for the vice president to be fucking hung," only to be told by the chief of staff that "You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn't think they're doing anything wrong."
If Cipollone could say, "Something needs to be done, or somebody is going to die and this is going to be on your fucking hands" in front of a 25-year-old staffer, he can say it to the committee. And Liz Cheney is finished negotiating behind closed doors while "a person close to Mr. Cipollone, who was not authorized to speak publicly" mumbles excuses about "complicated issues related to executive privilege" in Maggie Haberman's ear.
\u201cAs we heard yesterday, WH counsel Pat Cippollone had significant concerns re. Trump\u2019s Jan 6 activities. It\u2019s time for Mr. Cippollone to testify on the record. Any concerns he has about the institutional interests of his prior office are outweighed by the need for his testimony.\u201d— Rep. Liz Cheney (@Rep. Liz Cheney) 1656496218
In a cover letter to the subpoena, Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson reminded the former White House Counsel that the committee "reserved the right to request additional testimony from [him] on the record" when Cipollone sat for an un-transcribed interview back in April. Since then, they've been unable to get him to come in voluntarily to say what he knows about "Trump's awareness of and involvement in activities undertaken to subvert the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, including the submission of fake electoral ballots to Congress and the executive branch, the attempted appointment of Jeffrey Clark as acting Attorney General, and efforts to interfere with Congressional certification of the electoral results on January 6, 2021."
It's not clear what's going to happen next. As an officer of the court who is not apparently insane and would like to hang onto his license to practice law, Patsy Baloney is in a different position from Mark Meadows, Trump's comms flack Dan Scavino, and coup-coup for Cocoa Puffs lawyer John Eastman.
The question is whether this is a so-called "friendly subpoena," i.e. one that is issued as part of an agreement with a party who would otherwise be obliged to refuse to testify due to a non-disclosure agreement or, as the case may be, an invocation of privilege. Liz Cheney reading Cipollone the riot act on national television three times in the past month does not suggest that they've reached a deal. But, if indeed it is a friendly subpoena, it's entirely possible that they've hammered out an agreement as to subjects which will be off limits.
Good thing that this committee never leaks, because otherwise we could count on knowing for sure by close of business tomorrow.
HA HA.
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Supreme Court Kills Tribal Sovereignty Too In Case You Thought It Was Just 'Women' And 'Classrooms Of Kids'
What was that about our nation's history and traditions?
The Supreme Court tossed out decades of precedent (again) Wednesday, granting state governments wider authority in prosecuting crimes on Indian reservations than had been allowed under previous court decisions. The decision, written by Brett Kavanaugh, deeply undercut a Supreme Court decision from just two years ago. In that case McGirt v. Oklahoma, Neil Gorsuch believe it or not wrote a very good decision in favor of tribal rights.
As a result, big parts of eastern Oklahoma, including Tulsa, were declared to still be tribal land, where tribal or federal courts had jurisdiction in cases involving Native Americans. Oklahoma state government didn't care for that, and sued to have some of its prosecutorial power returned. Wednesday's decision accomplished that, at the price of undermining tribal sovereignty and tossing out much of established precedent.
ICYMI: Neil Gorsuch Wrote A Really Good Supreme Court Opinion. Wait, Where Are You Going?
As with other SCOTUS decisions this term, Wednesday's decision in Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta hinged on Donald Trump's addition of one more rightwing jerk to the court. In 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still around to join the majority in McGirt, but this week, Amy Coney Barrett joined four other rightwing justices to roll back McGirt in a serious way. This time around, Gorsuch wrote a very angry dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Stephen Breyer.
At issue in this case was a matter that had long been treated as settled law: What power do states have in criminal cases involving non-Indians? (We're going to use that dubious antiquated word more than we usually do, following the usage of the Court and some prominent Native American legal writers. Usage is always evolving, unless you're talking federal courts, right?)
Where We Are and How We Got Here
In cases where a crime is committed on Indian land, the jurisdiction varies on the basis of the identities of those involved: When both the accused and the victim are Indians, tribal or federal courts have authority. If both the offender and the victim are non-Indians, the case is tried in state court. When the accused is an Indian and the victim is non-Indian, the case goes to tribal or federal court. And up until the ruling in Castro-Huerta, the same held for cases where the perpetrator is non-Indian and the victim is Indian. Kavanaugh's decision holds that states will now have "concurrent" jurisdiction and can prosecute non-Native defendants in crimes committed against Native victims on tribal lands.
To be sure, the 2015 case at the heart of the decision is horrible: Victor Castro-Huerta, a non-Native man, was convicted of child neglect after his five-year-old stepdaughter, a member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee, was "found dehydrated, emaciated and covered in lice and excrement, weighing just 19 pounds." The girl is legally blind and has cerebral palsy. The state charged him and convicted him of neglect, and sentenced him to 35 years in prison.
Brett Kavanaugh Dresses Up As Custer
Then, while Castro-Huerta's case was on appeal, the Court handed down its McGirt decision, meaning that the Castro-Huerta case belonged in federal or tribal court. A state court vacated Castro-Huerta's conviction, and he was charged in federal court. He pleaded guilty and accepted a plea agreement with a seven year sentence.
That really appears to have pissed off Brett Kavanaugh, who explained in his decision,
In other words, putting aside parole possibilities, Castro-Huerta in effect received a 28-year reduction of his sentence as a result of McGirt.
Kavanaugh went on to say he believed that happened way too often:
After having their state convictions reversed, some non-Indian criminals have received lighter sentences in plea deals negotiated with the federal government. Others have simply gone free.
So forget all that "precedent" and "our nation's history and traditions" crap the Court has been banging on about lately. This at least partly comes down to Kavanaugh preferring long prison sentences. The state courts are willing to hand down far harsher punishments, and Castro-Huerta really had done something horrible, so too bad for tribal sovereignty.
Claiming that the Court had never taken a "hard look" at the legislation that has so far governed prosecutions in Indian country, Kavanaugh ultimately determined, nah, 200 years of settled law (not settler law, you stop that!) was actually just a big oopsie, and so "the court today holds that Indian country within a state's territory is part of a state, not separate from a state."
Non-Sovereign, Citizenship Questionable
The decision is a major departure from previous understandings of tribal sovereignty, as in it is the exact opposite, and as The New Republic notes, that's exactly what Oklahoma was after.
To get around McGirt, Oklahoma took aim at the root of tribal sovereignty itself. The state argued that it has concurrent jurisdiction to prosecute most crimes in Indian country, meaning that it could do so if the federal government could not or would not. Oklahoma’s challenge was that the practice and policy of the last two centuries pointed in the other direction. In 1832, the court ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that the state of Georgia could not exercise jurisdiction within Cherokee lands because the Cherokee Nation was a separate sovereign.
Other court rulings and laws passed by Congress reaffirmed the principle of tribal sovereignty in criminal cases involving Native Americans, as Gorsuch points out in his dissent, so that
[In] time, Worcester came to be recognized as one of this Court’s finer hours. The decision established a foundational rule that would persist for over 200 years: Native American tribes retain their sovereignty unless and until Congress ordains otherwise. Worcester proved that, even in the "courts of the conqueror," the rule of law meant something.
Kavanaugh's decision threw most of that in the garbage, contending that for two centuries, everyone had it wrong, and that since reservations fall within state boundaries, state law applies on them unless federal statutes specifically say otherwise. States, Kavanaugh wrote, "do not need a permission slip from Congress to exercise their sovereign authority." And now that's the law of the land, tough shit, he likes beer.
Neil Gorsuch, Surprisingly Right Again
In his dissent (starting on page 29 of the SCOTUS decision PDF) Gorsuch decried the majority opinion, underlining what its betrayal of the principle established in Worchester:
Where this Court once stood firm, today it wilts. After the Cherokee’s exile to what became Oklahoma, the federal government promised the Tribe that it would remain forever free from interference by state authorities. Only the Tribe or the federal government could punish crimes by or against tribal members on tribal lands. At various points in its history, Oklahoma has chafed at this limitation. Now, the State seeks to claim for itself the power to try crimes by non-Indians against tribal members within the Cherokee Reservation. Where our predecessors refused to participate in one State’s unlawful power grab at the expense of the Cherokee, today’s Court accedes to another’s.
The Court's assertion of state power on reservations, Gorsuch wrote, "comes as if by oracle, without any sense of the history recounted above and unattached to any colorable legal authority," and is shot through with "astonishing errors." (We wonder if he will take note for future! Nah.) Ultimately, he said, the Castro-Huerta decision belongs in the "anticanon" of terrible, eventually abandoned decisions like Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson.
'An Act of Conquest'
Native American legal scholars are astonished by the decision. NYU Law prof Maggie Blackhawk said on Twitter that the Court had gone against "hundreds of years of congressional action, against solid SCOTUS precedent, and hundreds of years of history," and that the Court had effectively "become a superlegislature. Precedent, statutes, separation of powers, reason, the rule of law, these things all mean nothing."
Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese, of Stanford Law, called Kavanaugh's decision "an act of conquest. Full stop." It's such an open power grab that she could barely stand to repeat the core betrayal of norms the decision represents.
The right and power of tribes to rule themselves is being dismissed in favor of state power.
Tribes are…I can’t even write it…part of states.
Hidalgo Reese followed that with a brief explanation of why this is important:
For those wondering, “Why is it bad that states can prosecute too?”
Three answers:
1- States/Tribes have a long history of animosity. Fair treatment isn’t a fair assumption.
2- Tribes want to make different laws for their land than states.
3- Many resources are a zero sum game. [...]
4- The feds & states can now blow off responsibility while scapegoat e/o for not prioritizing Indian Country (a difficult and expensive area to police and prosecute).
5- It'll be harder/complicated for tribes to make the case they need more authority to Congress (too many sovereigns in the kitchen already, why would adding another one help?).
There's one potentially bright spot in all this, as Dr. Blackhawk notes: Congress could reverse this very easily with a single brief law. The New Republic explains further: All that would be needed is
a single-sentence law that explicitly blocks concurrent jurisdiction. (Kavanaugh mocked Gorsuch for writing that sentence in the dissent but did not dispute it.)
But that needs to happen soon, before the Court decides to erode tribal sovereignty any further in upcoming cases.
[Oklahoma v. Castro-Huerta / NYT / New Republic / Maggie Blackhawk on Twitter / Elizabeth Hidalgo Reese on Twitter]
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Liz Cheney Just Saying GET YOUR ASS IN A CHAIR, PAT CIPOLLONE, YOU F*CKER
She's not letting this go.
Lately during public hearings of the House January 6 Select Committee, Liz Cheney takes time to very personally put former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone on blast over his refusal to testify publicly. At the end of last Thursday's hearing, Cheney said, "Our evidence shows that Pat Cipollone and his office tried to do what was right. They tried to stop a number of President Trump’s plans for Jan. 6." So come on over here, Pat, and let Liz Cheney put a gold star on your Trapper Keeper!
After Cheney said that, sources started telling journalists that Cip was already being really very cooperative, but blah blah blah "serious institutional concerns and privilege issues" blah blah blah. Fuck off.
Dude knows everything, and Cheney knows it, and everybody else knows it.
We know Cipollone threatened to resignmultiple times over Trump's coup attempts, and that he called the letters former DOJ douche Jeffrey Clark wanted to send to the states instructing them how to toss out their election results a "murder-suicide pact."
According to Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony, on the morning of January 6, Cipollone was freaking the fuck out trying to make sure nobody would take President Ketchup Smears to the Capitol, because they would get "charged with every crime imaginable" if he went there. He said "please keep in touch with me." From the same testimony, we know Mark Meadows reportedly told Cip during the riot that Trump believed Mike Pence deserved whatever was happening to him in the Capitol that day.
During yesterday's hearing, Liz Cheney asked Hutchinson if the White House Counsel's Office was concerned about the things Donald Trump planned to say in his speech to the buck-toothed hordes that day, the hordes we now know Trump was well-fucking-aware were armed to the teeth. (He knew they weren't there to hurt him.) Yes, the White House Counsel's Office did have concerns about that!
He knows everything. As Charlie Sykes wrote this morning, if "Hutchinson’s testimony wasn’t the John Dean moment, she made it clear that the testimony of the former White House counsel just might be."
And today Cheney is reiterating her calls for Cipollone to GET IN A CHAIR FUCKER NOW FUCKING NOW OH MY GOD JESUS FUCK.
\u201cAs we heard yesterday, WH counsel Pat Cippollone had significant concerns re. Trump\u2019s Jan 6 activities. It\u2019s time for Mr. Cippollone to testify on the record. Any concerns he has about the institutional interests of his prior office are outweighed by the need for his testimony.\u201d— Rep. Liz Cheney (@Rep. Liz Cheney) 1656496218
Come on, Pat. You scared of Liz Cheney, Pat? Where the fuck are you, Pat? Liz Cheney doesn't bite haha yes she does, GET OVER HERE AND GET BIT, PAT.
Looks like the Committee's gonna subpoena him anyway, so.
Cipollone's name came up a bunch of times during Hutchinson's testimony, on top of what we already mentioned. For instance, she said he told her on January 3 that "This would be legally a terrible idea for us, we have serious legal concerns if we go up to the Capitol that day." You know, because Mark Meadows and others were already talking on the 3rd about Trump maybe going to the Capitol on the 6th.
And then there were these colorful details, of what Cip was doing as Trump's terrorists raged:
Back at the White House, Hutchinson said she saw Cipollone “barreling down the hallway” looking for her boss, Meadows. She overheard the conversation: “I remember Pat saying to him, something to the effect of, ‘The rioters have gotten into the Capitol, Mark, we need to go down and see the president now.’ And Mark looked up [from his phone] and said ‘He doesn’t want to do anything, Pat.’”
She said Cipollone continued to pressure Meadows to convince Trump to call off the rioters: “Something needs to be done, or people are going to die, and blood is going to be on your f---ing hands. This is getting out of control.” They both marched out of the office, down to the dining room where Trump was, she testified.
But Trump didn't want to call them off. He didn't think they were doing anything wrong.
Yeah, we are pretty sure Pat Cipollone needs to raise his right hand and say all this on TV to the American people. Likewise, if that one Secret Service douche Tony Ornato, who loved Trump so much he accepted a deputy chief of staff position, wants to call Cassidy Hutchinson a liar over the story of Trump lunging and trying to drive the limo to the Capitol from the backseat, he needs to raise his own right hand. (Click here for some more background/reminders on who Ornato is and how he helped put together Trump's fascist Bible photo-op at Lafayette Square. Also this. Hutchinson doesn't seem to be the one with the credibility problems here.)
Come on, losers. Asses in chairs. Do it for America because you're scared of Liz Cheney.
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Ginni Thomas Wishes She Could Help The Jan 6 Committee, But ...
LOL, look at this bullshit.
Two weeks ago, Ginni Thomas was raring to march on the Capitol like the brave patriots of January 6, 2021 — the ones who didn't get cold and "leave" — to tell those fake Americans on the House January 6 Select Committee what's what!
“I can’t wait to clear up misconceptions. I look forward to talking to them,” Mrs. Justice Clarence Thomas told the Daily Caller on June 16, after it came out that not only had she been spamming legislators with debunked claims of ballot fraud after the 2020 election but she'd also emailed with Coups 4 Dummies lawyer John Eastman to get updates on the litigation to overturn Biden's win.
Not to mention those texts to Mark Meadows endorsing the most batshit insane conspiracies and asking about rumors that the “Biden crime family & ballot fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc) are being arrested & detained for ballot fraud right now & over coming days, & will be living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition.”
Awkward!
But it seems that in the past two weeks, Mrs. T has had a change of heart.
According to her lawyer Mark Paoletta, Thomas "is eager to clear her name and is willing to appear before the Committee."
BUT!
First the committee will need to "provide a better justification for why Mrs. Thomas's testimony is relevant to the Committee's legislative purpose."
Paoletta's eight-page letter, published by Politico, defends Thomas's effort to arrange for Eastman, a former clerk for her husband, to give a "litigation update" to her "Frontliners" group in their "cone of silence." His client "worked tirelessly and effectively to connect conservative leaders" and thought that Eastman might "want to speak to other conservative leaders interested in election issues."
In Paoletta's telling, the texts to Meadows were "entirely unremarkable." The wife of a sitting Supreme Court justice who was currently adjudicating cases brought by the Trump campaign and its allies was simply "pass[ing] along information that she had received and encourag[ing] him to investigate reports that were circulating in the public domain."
As for the spam emails, the lawyer snarks that it's "particularly ironic" that legislators, who routinely receive thousands of emails every week, would pretend that they care about such communications. He neglects to mention that an Arizona legislator actually responded to Ginni Thomas, and emailed her about her concerns — but perhaps that doesn't fit with his narrative that his client is just a regular citizen opining on matters of public interest.
The letter then veers off into crazytown, pointing out that Democrats sometimes object to electors, saying Select Committee Chair Bennie Thompson hates Justice Thomas, and repeating the lie that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "rejected Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy's chosen Republican Members to sit on this Committee" and thus the body has no ranking member and is illegal. This last is both untrue, since Pelosi only rejected Reps. Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, accepting three of McCarthy's proposed members and inviting him to nominate replacements for Jordan and Banks, and has already been rejected by multiple courts.
Then Paoletta, who worked as a lawyer for the House Oversight and Energy & Commerce committees in a past life, excoriates the committee for failing to "provide an environment where both sides had an opportunity to call witnesses." As if we didn't all watch Republican Liz Cheney question Republicans for the entire month of hearings!
And not for nothing, but Paoletta is probably pretty well-acquainted with those witnesses, since he served in the Trump administration, first as chief counsel to Mike Pence, and then as the top lawyer at the Office of Management and Budget, where he defended Trump's attempt to hold up congressionally allocated defense funds Trump withheld in an attempt to extort the president of Ukraine as very cool, very legal. It takes some balls to pretend that Jeff Rosen, Rich Donoghue, and Steven Engel — lifelong Republicans and fellow members of the Trump administration — are part of some Democratic plot to smear Trump.
But Paoletta, the author of a hagiography of Clarence Thomas, has a long history of doing and saying whatever it takes to help the GOP in general, and the Thomas family in particular. His greatest hits include smearing women who wanted to testify against Thomas during his nomination, massaging the narrative about Sarah Palin when she was John McCain's running mate, and, most recently, taking $50,000 to lobby Congress to back off Project Veritas's James O'Keefe for his role in the alleged theft of Ashley Biden's diary.
So maybe take it with a huge grain of salt when this asshole gets indignant about the campaign of "baseless harassment" by the committee during this "particularly stressful time" for the Thomases — yes, we're sure it is — and denies that she ever spoke to her husband about the election, while simultaneously refusing to put her on the stand to deny it herself.
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