Something isn't right at the Secret Service.
Prior to Trump, most of the concern about the political orientation of the FBI, the CIA, and the military came from the political left.
Trump changed that. He said those agencies were part of the Deep State, a group in opposition to him and conservative policies. He complained that his generals weren't as compliant as he thought Hitler's generals had been. His Justice Department, his cyber-security staff, his Vice President, and now even the National Archives were all part of the Deep State. The political left found itself defending these agencies.
Amid these accusations, the Secret Service was above reproach. It was supposedly utterly neutral. The left is re-thinking that.
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| Washington Post |
Herbert Rothschild, Jr. summarizes what we now learned from recent revelations of the House January 6 Committee. He has been associated with the political left for over six decades. He was an advocate for civil liberties, racial justice for Blacks, for peace, for the environment, and most recently for quality local journalism. This Guest Post originally appeared on October 21 in www.ashland.news, a nonprofit community news medium serving Ashland, Oregon. Rothschild was a founder of Ashland.news and currently serves as president of its board.
Guest Post by Herb Rothschild
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| Rothschild |
Concerns about the conduct of the Secret Service detail under the direction of Agent Robert “Bobby” Engel and Anthony “Tony” Ornato, Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, began long before it turned over a huge cache of documents (“hundreds of thousands,” according to committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren) to the committee on July 26. Indeed, the committee believed it had to issue a subpoena for the records because, the week before, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari sent a letter to the House and Senate Homeland Security Committees that crucial text messages agents sent on January 5 and 6 had been erased.
The agency claimed that those messages were lost by accident when there was “a device-replacement program,” and that Congress hadn’t requested until after the data migration was done that all records related to the insurrection be preserved. However, CNN reported that Congress informed the agency on January 16, 2021 and again on January 25, 2021 that it needed to preserve and produce those records. Adding to the January 6 Committee’s concern was a letter Cuffari sent directly to it in which he revealed that, in June, 2021, after he requested messages sent and received by 24 Secret Service agents between December 7, 2020 and January 8, 2021, the agency only provided one.
In an interview with MSNBC, Lofgren said there are "troubling behavior patterns" emerging from the committee's dealings with the Secret Service. She added, "I'm also concerned about the actions of the inspector general (Cuffari). He sat on this stuff for months and months and months as well, and now he has ordered the department to stop the forensics analysis of the phones, which we need.” On July 26, Bennie Thompson, chair of the January 6 Committee, and Carolyn Maloney, chair of the House Oversight Committee, demanded that Cuffari step aside from the investigation into the missing messages and that a new inquiry head be appointed.
A key question is why the Secret Service didn’t act on information it received both before January 6 and on that morning about how dangerous the crowd would be. At the televised hearing, Schiff quoted a tip the FBI relayed to the Secret Service on December 26, 2020: "Their [White Nationalists’] plan is to literally kill people. Please, please take this tip seriously." And we already knew that the Secret Service had observed on the morning of January 6 that many in the crowd were carrying weapons, including firearms. Nonetheless, the Secret Service didn’t urge the Capitol Police or the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department to beef up security around the Capitol.
Washington Post reporter Carol Leonnig, author of Zero Fail: The Rise and Fall of The Secret Service (2021), characterized Engel and Ornato as being "very, very close to President Trump." During an interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on June 29, 2022, Leonnig said, "some people accused them of at times being enablers and 'yes men' of the president — particularly Tony Ornato — and very much people who wanted to ... see him pleased." She claimed that there was a large contingent of Trump's Secret Service detail that wanted Biden to fail, and some "took to their personal media accounts to cheer on the insurrection and the individuals riding up to the Capitol as patriots." [I’ve found no verification of that last assertion.]
Ornato testified in January and again in March before the January 6 committee, although perhaps not under oath. Members of the committee have expressed frustration with aspects of Ornato’s testimony. Rep. Adam Kinzinger posted on Twitter, “There seems to be a major thread here… Tony Ornato likes to lie.”
Were Ornato and perhaps members of Trump’s security detail intentionally abetting the insurrection? The erased text messages might have answered that question. Maybe the committee will find other sources that will answer it. Weighing against complicity, perhaps, is Engel’s insistence that Trump be driven back to the White House after his speech at the Ellipse, which infuriated Trump, who wanted to join those besieging the Capitol.
There is, however, one more huge piece to the story of what transpired that day. When the Secret Service detail protecting Vice President Pence had led him to an undisclosed area where they could put him in a vehicle and drive away, the detail was in communication with Ornato. Apparently, Ornato wanted them to get Pence away from the Capitol and take him to Joint Base Andrews in Maryland. Pence refused (“I’m not getting in the car”), later explaining he felt that if the mob saw him fleeing, it would “validate” their assault.
But another explanation is that Pence knew he wouldn’t be able to finish the work of certifying the election results if he left. Rep. Jamie Raskin, another committee member, spoke about this in a televised conversation with Rev. Jim Wallis at Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice on April 21, 2022. He explained that if Pence was gone, Republicans could have used the Twelfth Amendment to let the House--state delegation by delegation, with each state having one vote--select the President.
Nicole Wallace of MSNBC on air July 14 read an excerpt from a new book by Lennig and Philip Rucker, I Alone Can Fix It, in which they reported that Pence’s National Security Advisor, Gen. Keith Kellogg (ret.), was in the White House just then, and Ornato told him that Secret Service agents were taking Pence away. Reportedly Kellogg replied, “You can’t do that, Tony. Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance.”
I don’t know why this aspect of Trump’s attempted coup hasn’t garnered sustained attention. It strikes me that the moment I’ve just discussed (“I’m not getting in the car”) was a decisive one. We’ll see how much prominence it gets in the committee’s final report.
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8 comments:
Yes, we narrowly missed Trump illegally remaining president. Imagine the chaos that would have entailed. Ukraine would be Russia and other neighboring countries would be at risk as well. Our military would be either corrupted or at least divided. Would blue states accept the status of Trump being president? War in the blue states between the Trump people and non Trump people? Talk about a dystopian image, I can see it and think we we’re pretty close to a breakdown of our society. Pence did not get in the car- indeed a decisive moment.
It's understandable under present circumstances that Democrats of rarefied principle continue to prioritize January 6 as the midterm elections approach, even if--especially if--rank and file Democrats plus everyone else don't rank it as a top ten issue.
So many voters are distracted by prosaic matters such as the economy, energy production, inflation, crime, and mass vagrancy and illegal immigration, that control of the House and Senate may well rise and fall thereby, and not on Benghazi, sorry, 1/6.
It's of comparatively little moment given the Committeee's work that the odds are Drazan wins, Lake wins, Whitmer and Hochul lose, Laxalt, Walker, Masters, Vance, Johnson and Oz all win, and Republicans gain 30+ seats in the House. Pearls before swine...
People might wonder what the difference is between us and the Germans, that they would allow a monster like Hitler to take control of their country. The answer is there’s no difference. We've just been fortunate that such a madman has not yet been able to capture the public’s imagination. In 2020, we came too close for comfort. The problem is that our madman’s efforts are ongoing. Let’s not forget, Hitler also made a coup attempt that failed, but ten years later he held dictatorial power.
Hitler’s rise to power was aided in part by his willingness to use violence in advancing his political objectives and to recruit party members willing to do the same. Now we see that happening here. This time our checks and balances worked. They worked against Hitler the first time too. Then they didn’t.
Judging by everything else that happened around then, I think that if Pence had left that day, Congress would have reconvened later that night or the next day, and Biden’s Election would have been confirmed.
Despite our current political polarization, we are a long way from Weimar Germany. No one's having to buy a load of bread with a wheelbarrow full of paper currency (yet).
Where do folks learn to write (and I assume speak) like pompous asses from another century? Where is this taught or is it self-taught? It is very off putting and just plain odd, which is why I usually skip over those comments. Ernest Hemingway would not approve.
It’s true the U.S. is no Weimar Republic, but those inclined to imagine it can’t happen here should check out this brief but informative article from a very credible source before becoming too complacent:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/06/weimars-lessons-for-bidens-america/
Democrats are going to get slaughtered in two weeks, and it's too late to stop the train.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going down hard, as is Pelosi.
The GOP is going to make Pelosi's January 6th committee look like Amateur Hour.
Christine Drazan will reverse the tranny-mania currently polluting the Oregon school system.
Oregon will be saved from Tina Kotek and her Marxist radicalism.
No more climate change and New Green Deal nonsense.
It’s true the U.S. is no Weimar Republic, but those inclined to imagine it can’t happen here should check out this brief but informative article from a very credible source before becoming too complacent:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/06/weimars-lessons-for-bidens-america/
Good article. Food for thought. Fingers crossed we do better than Germany did…
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