When your whole life is one big scam.
Interesting. pic.twitter.com/Z3G2BVIluU
— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) August 6, 2021
Aug 7, 2021
Today's Tweet
When your whole life is one big scam.
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, August 6, 2021
10,224 people were killed by COVID-19
99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated
World
New Cases: 696,913 (⬆︎ .34%)
New Deaths: 10,224 (⬆︎ .24%)
USA
New Cases: 130,706 (⬆︎ .36%)
New Deaths: 750 (⬆︎ .12%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 193.8 million (58.4%)
Fully Vaccinated: 165.9 million (50.0%)
NYT suggests we not take this approach with the Vax-Hesitant knuckleheads.
Sarah Smarsh, NYT: (pay wall)
Fellow county residents waited their turn in muddy boots and faded work jackets while the April wind stirred their fields of early wheat. There was corn to plant, but they had found time to make long drives to what was then the only vaccination site in 500 square miles. Our ages, politics and backgrounds varied, but we were mostly white, rural people who wanted to live.
Today, the wheat has been harvested and the corn is high, but still roughly one in three people approved for the vaccine across the country has not yet received — in many cases, has willfully refused — a single dose.
Abetted by that slow rollout, Covid-19 has resurged. Following a short, beautiful moment of relaxed precautions while cases were down at the start of summer, we again don masks, change plans and worry about how to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe. Vaccination rates are on the rise as the hesitant become less so, but the coronavirus will likely be with us indefinitely. How does one process this brutal reality?
Many vaccinated Americans are tired, disgusted and eager to assign blame. Public health experts and government officials, including some Republicans, have shifted from sensitive prodding to firm condemnation of those forgoing vaccination. Private conversations among the inoculated take an even less diplomatic turn: “We were so close, and these stupid, unvaccinated jerks ruined it for the rest of us.”
Fatigue and outrage are appropriate emotions, considering all that has been lost to Covid-19: lives, jobs, experiences, money, physical and mental health. But those feelings, if not properly channeled, can themselves take a heavy toll. What do we do with our anger?
I am a progressive woman who resides in a conservative state. I am on record in this fractured political era as a proponent of maintaining connection across gulfs of understanding, with the caveat that this civic burden falls to people whose social privileges allow them to engage safely with “the other side.” But seeking to understand dangerous behaviors and beliefs is quite different than permitting them. I myself, by many accounts an amiable person, once yelled at a truck stop full of unmasked people to read the sign on the goddamn door.
Fury — collective, generational, political, cultural, individual — is utterly familiar to me, more so than the happy serenity of my current life. I was a child in poverty during the 1980s “farm crisis,” when federal policies favoring big corporations devastated rural communities. Everywhere I turned, something was dying: the local grocery store, the family farm, the cancer victims whose water supply contained agricultural runoff. There was joy in my family, but there was also addiction, abuse and neglect that drew from a deep well of justifiable rage and sorrow.
Anger is a contagious energy that jumps quickly from one person to the next. It will seize your mind and body as its host. If allowed to explode, it will hurt others. If allowed to implode, it will hurt you. I had to learn early how to transmute it for the sake of my own survival. I found that it can be the source of a powerful alchemy. If we are up to the task, it could help us create something good together.
That alchemy begins with awareness. Are we justified in our indignation? Do we have the facts? If we do not understand the problem, our feelings are untethered from reality. Untethered anger tends to be unproductive and selfish, delighting our own egos rather than directing us toward necessary action.
So when you are ready — and if you are never ready, whether because you mourn a loved one’s death or your own altered future, I won’t judge — let us hold our rage in our hands and look closely to see what it contains.
Our national conversation has reached the point where many Americans are done with any and all excuses offered by the unvaccinated. Some of the inoculated are not just self-righteous but downright venomous, arguing on social media that hospitals should refuse to admit unvaccinated Covid-19 patients, calling them trash and wishing them a painful death. Residents of blue America have pronounced this a red-America problem. “Our state did a great job fighting the pandemic,” one person tweeted. “Our reward? The mouth-breathing knuckle-draggers in adjacent red states flooded their hospitals and spilled over into ours.”
Old political resentments have found a new outlet in the fraught vaccine debate. “I’ve been pissed off since Reagan was elected,” another Twitter user quipped in a thread parsing the emotions of the vaccinated. Exhausted, despairing minds find comfort in turning complex realities into simple, opposing categories. The noble, upstanding vaccinated American and the selfish, stupid, unvaccinated one. The good liberal citizen and the far-right anti-vaxxer.
Available images reinforce these notions. A vocal contingent of conservatives appear at meetings holding hypocritical signs about liberty, on the Internet sharing memes about liberal sheep, on the nightly news spitting on public health officials. They command attention, and their share of the unvaccinated will increase as more persuadable people get their shots. But they are not yet the overwhelming majority of the vaccine reluctant. A study of survey results from March showed that 16 percent of eligible Americans refused the vaccine because of skepticism about the pandemic, marked by a belief in at least one conspiracy theory. The same study found that a higher number, some 22 percent, hadn’t gotten vaccinated because of concerns about cost, safety or systems that previously did them wrong. Millions more, of course, are children under 12 and those disqualified by underlying health conditions.
My white, working-class family contains liberal women and men who have been vaccinated; liberal men who have not for fear of losing a day of work to side effects; conservative men who refuse under the influence of disinformation; liberal women and men who have delayed for fear of the for-profit health care industry; and conservative women who are considering getting their first dose. My grandmother — a former Bernie Sanders voter, a childhood polio survivor and a strong compulsory vaccination proponent — was the first among us to get a shot.
I cringe when I see the rampant stereotypes on social media painting the unvaccinated as rural white folks, by now a frequent scapegoat for our country’s ills. “Spreadnecks,” I’ve seen them newly termed (as in, “rednecks” spreading the virus). Never mind that, per the C.D.C., the daily case rates in urban and nonmetropolitan areas closely track one another.
This archetypal bumpkin villain of post-Trump America has long received too much credit in a country where Trumpism thrives in affluent, white urban communities bursting with college degrees. In handling the pandemic, such misdirection of attention keeps us from what we should be doing: trying to reach the vast group of people who might choose vaccination if barriers to access and knowledge were removed.
One overlooked barrier, as ever in this country, is socioeconomic class. Polls conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation earlier this year found that working-class people — white, Black, Hispanic, Democrat, Republican — were less likely to be vaccinated. Vaccination rates for Black and white college graduates, meanwhile, were almost identical. The so-called “uneducated” of all races and backgrounds are hampered not by a lack of good sense but by a lack of money and power. Their education status keeps their income low, and income predicts insurance status. When the highly contagious Delta variant was taking hold, uninsured Americans had the lowest vaccination rate of 22 subgroups examined by Kaiser.
Having gone without health insurance for much of my life, I can attest that the experience does not promote trust in the health care system, better known to the uninsured as a crippling source of debt than a helpful provider of cures. The Center for Economic and Policy Research found that states with higher rates of insured people generally have higher vaccination rates. People of color are disproportionately uninsured, as conditions of class — poverty and lack of education — intersect with systemic racism. Nonetheless, myriad news stories investigating the vaccination divide fail to mention the words class, education or income once.
The longer we spend furious at the bad actors among us, the further we move from the truth: That many unvaccinated people are scared just like us, and that with the right help and information, they would sit down next to nurses and pull up their sleeves. We must instead turn our anger into actions that help our cause.
We can demand public-health mandates, political blowback be damned. We can communicate with the cost-anxious and wait-and-see people who remain open-minded despite skepticism wrought by a lifetime of disadvantage. We can do good deeds to negate harmful ones, like donating money to a nonprofit health clinic when we see anti-science protesters on the sidewalk or in the news. We can also, in my opinion, occasionally tell those protesters to screw off, if it gets us to our next moment of grace. (I didn’t say I was enlightened.)
Most importantly, we can direct our rage not at lost individuals but at systems of power that made our grim national death count the only plausible outcome. Is it so shocking that a caste-based society that exalts individualism and prioritizes profit above wellness — one of the only industrialized nations without universal health care — would fail to rise to the challenges of a collective health crisis?
Despite our failings of national character, Americans were the fortunate few at the front of an eight-billion-person line, saved by stockpiles of quickly developed vaccines that poor countries around the world have struggled to access. We were among the first of our entire species invited to receive a tremendous feat of modern science into our blood — a choice that hundreds of thousands of Covid-19 victims, who died before vaccines were available to them, did not live to make. Those of us who get the vaccines, current data tells us, will almost certainly survive this pandemic and even a lifetime of seasonal, endemic Covid-19 outbreaks.
Maintaining that perspective can be hard when staying healthy requires keeping track of case counts, changing guidelines, the science of booster shots and the safety rankings of face masks. So when all else fails, if your anger at “the unvaccinated” feels unbearable, focus less on those whose actions are beyond your control. Remember how you felt last spring, at a city stadium or a suburban pharmacy or a rural community building, when you got a shot. How will you remember its blessing? What will you do with the life that it saved?
Aug 6, 2021
What If
What if the QAnon boneheads are just a buncha guys who grew up watching Scooby Doo, but now they're remembering it wrong - thinking it was a documentary?
Kinda like Creationists and The Flintstones.
Today's Tweet
You know things are bad in the Republican party when it's too toxic for Dick Cheney.
— Covie (@covie_93) August 5, 2021
COVID-19 Update
Yesterday, August 5th, 2021
10,396 people were killed by COVID-19
99.996 % of them were not fully vaccinated
World
New Cases: 706,408 (⬆︎ .35%)
New Deaths: 10,396 (⬆︎ .24%)
USA
New Cases: 120,945 (⬆︎ .33%)
New Deaths: 559 (⬆︎ .09%)
USA Vaccination Scorecard
Total Vaccinations: 193.2 million (58.2%)
Fully Vaccinated: 165.6 million (49.9%)
The Red Plague
Bryce Covert, writing for NYT, wants us to be nice to the folks who aren't getting vaccinated because the majority of them aren't the pig-headed ogres we tend to picture them to be.
No, the Unvaccinated Aren’t All Just Being Difficult
On a July day in downtown Lowell, Mass., the first sunny Saturday of the month, people began to line up for a block party. Food trucks offered everyone a free empanada or egg roll. A D.J. played music. There were kid-friendly activities, too, like a touch-a-truck station with a fire truck and an ambulance.
The party wasn’t just a way to have a good time. The real motivation was to get people in the community vaccinated against Covid-19. Nestled between the food trucks were ones offering Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
In the minds of the public health and community organizers who staged it, it was a roaring success. Sixty-four people got vaccinated within six hours. Hannah Tello, a community health data manager at the nonprofit Greater Lowell Health Alliance, noted that it was eight to 10 times as many vaccinations as what their mobile clinics had been doing; their most successful day before this administered 12.
The people who got shots at the party “were not people who were resistant,” Dr. Tello told me. Outreach workers went to a nearby park and invited the homeless people there to get free food and, if they wanted, a vaccination, and many took them up on the offer in such a low-stakes, nonmedical setting.
An elderly woman who cares for two people with disabilities had tried and failed to schedule vaccinations for all three of them at the same time. This time, she succeeded. A woman who was able to vaccinate all the other eligible people in her family hadn’t been able to get it herself because she has four young children she wasn’t allowed to take to the vaccination center. That day her children played cornhole while she got the shot.
The party organizers also reached about 250 other attendees, many of whom had conversations about their concerns. Some were worried that the vaccines cost money, even though they’re free to all. They were concerned they would need some sort of documentation, which they don’t. One woman hadn’t gotten the shot yet because she has an intense fear of needles; she did it that day after 25 minutes of talking it through. “Her getting her shot is just as important as the people who lined up outside our clinics a few months ago,” Dr. Tello said. “No one is less deserving of having access.”
The country’s vaccination campaign has lagged since April, and that has allowed for a spike in cases, particularly in largely unvaccinated areas. Vaccinations have risen lately in response to the spread of the Delta variant, but rather than keeping its foot on the gas and throwing every idea, every resource at the problem, the White House has started to shift the blame onto those who still haven’t gotten a shot. President Biden grumbled that he has struck a “brick wall” in persuading more Americans to get the shot. Last week, taking aim at those he called “unvaccinated, unbothered and unconvinced,” he said, “If you’re out there unvaccinated, you don’t have to die. Read the news.”
There are plenty of Americans who have been inundated with misinformation about the vaccines. Many are staunchly opposed to getting it for a variety of reasons, from personal health concerns to conspiracy theories. But that doesn’t describe everyone who is unvaccinated — not by a long shot. And there are plenty of things we can do to reach them if we’re serious about spending the time and the money.
Instead, the current approach is to argue that access has increased and it’s everyone’s individual responsibility to get a shot — and if you don’t, it’s on you. Once again, we have taken the cruelly American, ruggedly individualistic tactic of making this about personal responsibility, not about a systemic response, just as we did in combating the virus itself.
“It’s not a public health strategy for any condition to just blame somebody into treatment and prevention,” said Rhea Boyd, a pediatrician and public health advocate. Telling the unvaccinated that they’re being selfish “really runs counter to all the work it’s going to take to convince those folks to be vaccinated, to trust us that we have their best interests in mind.”
It’s also shortsighted. If some people continue to struggle with getting vaccinated, the virus will continue to run rampant, threatening a rebound in economic activity and giving the coronavirus a chance to mutate yet again. The refrain we’ve heard throughout is still true: We’re not safe until we’re all safe.
Those who aren’t yet vaccinated are much more likely to be food insecure, have children at home and earn little. About three-quarters of unvaccinated adults live in a household that makes less than $75,000 a year. They are nearly three times as likely as the vaccinated to have had insufficient food recently. Many of them have pressing concerns they can’t just put aside because they need to get a vaccination.
Access is far more widespread than it was at the beginning of the year. Many cities now offer multiple venues for getting it without needing an appointment. But about 10 percent of the eligible population still lives more than a 15-minute drive from a vaccine distribution location. And even if there’s a site down the road, it usually requires taking time off work — not just to get the shot but also potentially to recover from the side effects — arranging transportation and figuring out child care.
“Missing out on a few hours of work seems very easy to us, but in fact it could be the matter of having food for the family versus not,” said Ann Lee, the chief executive of the nonprofit Community Organized Relief Effort. For these people, when they’re weighing whether to get a vaccination or potentially forgo some wages, “the wages are going to win out.”
Those who are unvaccinated are also likely to work in essential jobs like agriculture and manufacturing that don’t allow them to step away from work. They work long hours and may prioritize time with their families or communities when they finally get a break. People who have multiple jobs may find it impossible to schedule a shot in between all of their shifts.
And yet 43 percent of the unvaccinated say they definitely or probably would get it or are unsure, according to Julia Raifman, an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Public Health.
“We pretty quickly exhausted those who were easiest to reach and vaccinate,” Tara Smith, a public health professor at Kent State, told me. “This next phase is more difficult, but I don’t think it’s impossible to continue to get more people vaccinated. We just have to get creative.”
A block party doesn’t work in every community, particularly more rural ones. For those places, an event could be staged at a church or a county fair. Anything that allows people to discuss their concerns with experts and get vaccinated on the spot erases dangerous lag time. Dr. Tello’s organization found that many disappeared in the time between an educational conversation and a vaccination appointment weeks later.
Another way to take the vaccines to people for whom the logistics are complicated is to do it at workplaces. Ms. Lee’s organization held a vaccination drive at a construction site in Washington, D.C., and vaccinated 165 people. “They wanted to get vaccinated. There was just no way some of these day laborers were going to take off of work and maybe get sick,” Ms. Lee said. In January, Riverside, Calif., began a program to take vaccines into the fields to reach agricultural workers.
There are plenty of other smart places to distribute vaccines. Take them to food pantries, where low-income and food-insecure people show up by necessity on a regular basis. Do vaccinations at shopping centers where everyone goes to buy food. Vaccine drives could also be held on the first day of school for parents and older children alike; it’s late in the game, since it takes weeks for full immunity, but it’s better than missing them entirely.
Going door to door can also reach people, particularly those who are homebound. The Central Falls Housing Authority in Rhode Island offered shots to its public housing residents at the end of last year, and by January, 80 percent had been vaccinated. In Los Angeles, Ms. Lee’s team contacts the homebound first to talk through any concerns and again a week later to administer a vaccine. Vaccines could even be paired with Meals on Wheels deliveries.
To address transportation issues, the White House collaborated with Uber and Lyft to give free rides up to $25 to and from vaccination sites. But those companies don’t operate in every community, particularly outside cities. The government could also give grants to community organizations that can give people free rides to vaccination sites. “If you have a bus at a church, you can get a grant,” Dr. Boyd suggested.
We have to mandate paid leave so workers can take at least two days to get a shot and recover without jeopardizing their incomes. The Biden administration has offered tax credits to employers with fewer than 500 employees to cover the cost of offering paid leave for getting vaccinated, which he expanded this month. Some states, including New York, have mandated it. But everywhere else, it’s up to an employer to offer it, and if existing paid leave benefits are any guide, it’s the lowest-wage workers who are least likely to get it. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration released an emergency temporary standard in June that requires employers to provide paid time off to get vaccinated and recover, but it applies only to health care workers, despite the fact that a draft version included everyone.
Short of that, community organizations can send people home from getting vaccinated with enough food for their families if they have to miss work for a day or two. When Ms. Lee’s organization did testing in the Navajo Nation, it gave people two weeks of food in case they got a positive result and had to quarantine. It’s now sending people home with food as well as diapers, formula and hygiene kits with things like shampoo and tampons.
Parents also need child care — not just for getting their shots but also if they experience side effects. The government is working with four large child care providers to offer free care, but those centers may not be available to everyone, nor will all parents feel comfortable sending their children to an unfamiliar setting. Instead, we could give them money to pay their trusted source of child care and also offer care at vaccination centers.
State and local officials can kick-start some of this on their own. But the real money, and the power to set the agenda, comes from the White House and Congress. “If the federal government said, ‘We are really concerned, we see that low-income people have not had access to the vaccine, and we’re putting forth a huge effort to bring it to them in their workplaces and homes,’” Dr. Raifman said, “that would be a compelling message that would mobilize people across the country.” Federal funding needs to be filtered down to the local level as quickly as possible. There’s a lot of money for vaccinations, but it has to get to the organizations that are deeply embedded in their communities and ready to pull this off.
Dr. Tello’s organization plans to repeat the block party this summer, this time as a back-to-school event, handing out free backpacks and school supplies as well as flu shots alongside the Covid vaccines. And it will be timed so that those who got their first shot of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine at July’s party can get their second dose on the spot. “Sometimes,” she said, “you have to make it too convenient so that people can’t say no.”
How Stuff Works
This is how a lot of gnarly complicated shit gets worked out. Let the courts decide.
I just wish I had more confidence in a Roberts court to make a human-friendly decision when the majority thinks corporations are people.
Mexico sues US gun manufacturers over arms trafficking
The Mexican government has sued some of the biggest US gun manufacturers, accusing them of fuelling bloodshed through reckless business practices.
The lawsuit alleges that the companies knew they were contributing to illegal arms trafficking, which has been linked to many deaths.
Officials say Mexico is seeking as much as $10bn (£7.2bn) in compensation, though any amount would be decided by the court.
The companies have not yet commented.
They include Smith & Wesson and Barrett Firearms, among others. The BBC has contacted both companies for comment.
The lawsuit was filed on Wednesday in the US state of Massachusetts.
It says the Mexican government took the action "to put an end to the massive damage that the [companies] cause by actively facilitating the unlawful trafficking of their guns to drug cartels and other criminals in Mexico".
The gun manufacturers "are conscious of the fact that their products are trafficked and used in illicit activities against the civilian population and authorities of Mexico", the Foreign Ministry said in a document related to the lawsuit.
Mexico said the companies had used "marketing strategies to promote weapons that are ever more lethal, without mechanisms of security or traceability".
Mexican officials said that some of the guns made by Colt appeared to target the Mexican market in particular, such as a pistol engraved with the face and name of Mexican revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata.
Mexico has strict rules regulating the sale of weapons and they can only be purchased legally at one shop located on an army base in the capital.
As a result, those who want to buy weapons often get them from the US.
According to a Mexican government statement, criminal organisations buy thousands of pistols, rifles, assault weapons and ammunition in supermarkets, on the internet and at arms fairs in the US which are then used to commit crimes in Mexico.
The US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that 70% of firearms recovered in Mexico between 2014 and 2018 which were submitted for tracing had come from the US.
In 2019 alone, more than 17,000 murders in Mexico were linked to trafficked weapons.
One official told reporters the damage caused by trafficked guns would be equal to around 1.7% of Mexico's gross domestic product (GDP).
Speaking at a news conference on Wednesday, Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said: "We are going to win the trial and we are going to drastically reduce illicit arms trafficking to Mexico."
Mexican officials stressed that the lawsuit was not aimed at the US government. Mr Ebrard said he believed that President Joe Biden's administration was willing to work with Mexico to curb arms trafficking.
But experts have cast doubt on Mexico's likelihood of success with the lawsuit.
Lorenzo Meyer, an emeritus professor at the College of Mexico, told AFP news agency that US law "makes it almost impossible for gun manufacturers to be held responsible" for the illegal trade.
So even though the suit is probably destined to fail, it can be an important step on our road back to sanity.
Aug 5, 2021
Deep Thought
There are people resistant to intelligence due to the reverse snobbery of the stupid.
Today's Quote
Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage.
Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable. In general, nobody feels that war is criminal, or that accepting it is a criminal attitude.
In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It's monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering.
--Dalai Lama
Today's Jan6 Stuff
WaPo: (pay wall)
Not patriots, not political prisoners — U.S. judges slam Capitol riot defendants at sentencing
A federal judge rejected claims that detained defendants in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach are “political prisoners” or that riot participants acted out of patriotism before sentencing a Michigan man to six months in prison Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson of Washington said Karl Dresch, 41, of Calumet, Mich, was held because of his actions, not his political views, and that others who joined the attack on Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 presidential election could face prison time.
“He was not a political prisoner,” Jackson said. “We are not here today because he supported former president Trump . . . He was arrested because he was an enthusiastic participant in an effort to subvert and undo the electoral process.”
In a deal with prosecutors, Dresch pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of parading, picketing or demonstrating in the Capitol after four other charges were dropped, including a felony count of obstructing an official proceeding of Congress.
- more -
The wrangling is going to be weird and complicated.
The Hill:
Five big questions as Jan. 6 panel preps subpoenas
Leaders of the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack say they can't let the August recess halt their work and that they’re preparing to send a flurry of subpoenas to start gathering evidence.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and staunch Trump defender Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are among those who may be called to testify, in addition to requests for reams of documents and communications.
Here are five big questions facing the special committee as they head into their second month.
Will the panel hit roadblocks for subpoenaed documents?
Members of the committee have made clear that the first stage of their investigation will focus on gathering evidence.
“We have already had discussions about the need to subpoena documents and the sense of urgency we have. Normally we would request voluntary compliance. We may move quickly to subpoenas when it comes to documents so that we ensure that they're preserved and that there's no delay,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told reporters last week.
Should lawmakers like McCarthy and Jordan be called to testify?
McCarthy and Jordan, two of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill, both have confirmed they held separate phone calls with the former president on Jan. 6.
Investigators are particularly interested in those conversations as they try to figure out what actions Trump took after he delivered a speech outside the White House urging thousands of his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Congress’s certification of President Biden’s election victory.
But subpoenaing lawmakers can be a complex issue.
Could any Democratic witnesses offer testimony?
Two House Democrats have said publicly they warned police about a possible violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters one week before the deadly riot. House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (Calif.) and Rep. Frederica Wilson (Fla.) held separate phone calls with top Capitol Police brass, urging them to take measures to harden security at the Capitol.
Will they go after former Trump officials?
Trump and his legal team would likely turn to the courts to try to stop the committee from subpoenaing any of his former officials.
But a variety of former officials, including those who once worked at the Justice Department, could provide key details for a committee that may delve beyond the security failures leading up to the attack and wade more broadly into Trump’s efforts to challenge the election.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the select committee, wouldn’t discuss the names of any Trump officials who might be subpoenaed.
Will there be an August hearing?
Members of the Jan. 6 committee are still weighing whether to hold a public hearing sometime during the six-week summer recess, an idea that’s been floated by Thompson.
Five big questions as Jan. 6 panel preps subpoenas
Leaders of the special committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack say they can't let the August recess halt their work and that they’re preparing to send a flurry of subpoenas to start gathering evidence.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and staunch Trump defender Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) are among those who may be called to testify, in addition to requests for reams of documents and communications.
Here are five big questions facing the special committee as they head into their second month.
Will the panel hit roadblocks for subpoenaed documents?
Members of the committee have made clear that the first stage of their investigation will focus on gathering evidence.
“We have already had discussions about the need to subpoena documents and the sense of urgency we have. Normally we would request voluntary compliance. We may move quickly to subpoenas when it comes to documents so that we ensure that they're preserved and that there's no delay,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) told reporters last week.
Should lawmakers like McCarthy and Jordan be called to testify?
McCarthy and Jordan, two of Trump’s top allies on Capitol Hill, both have confirmed they held separate phone calls with the former president on Jan. 6.
Investigators are particularly interested in those conversations as they try to figure out what actions Trump took after he delivered a speech outside the White House urging thousands of his supporters to march to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stop Congress’s certification of President Biden’s election victory.
But subpoenaing lawmakers can be a complex issue.
Could any Democratic witnesses offer testimony?
Two House Democrats have said publicly they warned police about a possible violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters one week before the deadly riot. House Financial Services Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters (Calif.) and Rep. Frederica Wilson (Fla.) held separate phone calls with top Capitol Police brass, urging them to take measures to harden security at the Capitol.
Will they go after former Trump officials?
Trump and his legal team would likely turn to the courts to try to stop the committee from subpoenaing any of his former officials.
But a variety of former officials, including those who once worked at the Justice Department, could provide key details for a committee that may delve beyond the security failures leading up to the attack and wade more broadly into Trump’s efforts to challenge the election.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the select committee, wouldn’t discuss the names of any Trump officials who might be subpoenaed.
Will there be an August hearing?
Members of the Jan. 6 committee are still weighing whether to hold a public hearing sometime during the six-week summer recess, an idea that’s been floated by Thompson.
- more -
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