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Along with Officer Torres, the deceased victims were identified by officials as Nicole Connors, 53, Susan Karnatz, 49, Mary Marshall, 34, and James Thompson,16.
Source Article from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63253516
Characterizing excerpts of nearly a dozen depositions from top aides to Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, the committee described a president who had been informed repeatedly that he lost the election and that his claims of fraud were unfounded — only to reject them and continue to mislead the American public.
He then pushed top advisers to continue strategizing ways to overturn the election results.
The panel released its findings as part of a legal push to force John Eastman, an attorney who was a key driver of Trump’s strategy to subvert the 2020 election, to produce crucial emails tying together elements of the scheme they described.
In 16 accompanying exhibits, the panel showcased testimony it received from key figures in Trump-world, including campaign adviser Jason Miller, White House communications aide Ben Williamson, Pence national security adviser Keith Kellogg, Pence counsel Greg Jacob and Pence chief of staff Marc Short. Top Justice Department officials also provided crucial testimony revealed by the panel Wednesday night, including Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his top adviser, Richard Donoghue.
A deposition of Eastman himself reveals that the Trump ally invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination nearly 150 times in declining to answer the committee’s questions.
Other documents include a page from Trump’s private Jan. 6 schedule, released to the Jan. 6 select committee by the National Archives in recent weeks. The schedule includes an 11:20 a.m. call with Pence, as well as a call with then-Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.).
Although the evidence offers insight into the contours of what is likely to be the committee’s final report, it is only a small window into the 650-plus interviews the panel has conducted.
Determining whether Trump violated criminal law on Jan. 6 is a complex undertaking, though the panel’s findings may drive up pressure on the Justice Department to reveal its own thinking on the matter. Prosecutors have charged hundreds of Trump supporters who breached the Capitol with seeking to obstruct Congress’ effort to count electoral votes, but applying that law to the former president presents a trickier calculus.
The panel says the evidence supports an “inference” that Trump knew he had lost the election — Miller described a blunt conversation with Trump in which campaign aides told him he had lost — “but the President nevertheless sought to use the Vice President to manipulate the results in his favor.”
The bulk of the committee’s legal filing focused on reconstructing Eastman’s efforts to justify ordering Pence to overturn the election single-handedly when he presided over Congress’ electoral-vote-counting session on Jan. 6, 2021.
Eastman, however, didn’t relent even after a violent mob — egged on by Trump — stormed the Capitol and sent Pence and Congress fleeing for safety. Eastman continued to press Pence to overturn the election.
“Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Jacob, Pence’s counsel, emailed Eastman, along with a lengthy refutation of his argument.
“The ‘siege’ is because YOU and your boss did not do what was necessary to allow this to be aired in a public way so the American people can see for themselves what happened,” Eastman replied, according to emails obtained by the panel.
Jacob subsequently apologized for his language, attributing it to the stress of being moved to a safe location while his wife and three children were watching the news and he was fearing for his safety.
Even after this exchange, Eastman made one final plea to convince Pence to stop the counting of electoral votes, acknowledging it would amount to a “relatively minor” violation of the federal law known as the Electoral Count Act.
“Plaintiff knew what he was proposing would violate the law, but he nonetheless urged the Vice President to take those actions,” the committee wrote in its filings.
Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said in a statement later Wednesday that their fact-finding strongly suggested that “Dr. Eastman’s emails may show that he helped Donald Trump advance a corrupt scheme to obstruct the counting of electoral college ballots and a conspiracy to impede the transfer of power.”
The select committee revealed its evidence as part of a bid to convince a federal judge to require Eastman to provide more of his own emails — held by his former employer Chapman University — to congressional investigators. Eastman sued to block the panel from accessing his Chapman emails, claiming they would reveal records protected by attorney-client privilege.
But the panel’s emphasis on potential crimes may convince U.S. District Court Judge David Carter — who has repeatedly ruled against Eastman — that none of Eastman’s records are protected by privilege.
Carter, who is based in California, has rejected Eastman’s attempts to shield his records, citing the urgency and significance of the select committee’s work. Instead, Carter has ordered Eastman to quickly review 90,000 pages of emails and attachments and to itemize any he thinks should be withheld because of attorney-client privilege. He has repeatedly sided with the committee’s demands, such as requiring Eastman to prioritize emails sent between Jan. 4 and Jan. 7, 2021, and to force him to disclose his legal relationship with Trump, which had never been publicly revealed.
But the committee indicated that Eastman’s purported relationship with Trump fails to prove he had a legitimate claim of attorney client privilege.
Eastman, according to the panel, produced a letter identifying his client as Trump’s campaign, but the letter was left unsigned. “This unsigned and unauthenticated engagement letter is insufficient to establish an attorney-client relationship during the period at issue,” the House’s lawyers wrote.
Source Article from https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/02/jan6-trump-obstruction-justice-00013440
PRZEMYSL, Poland — As more than 2 million refugees from Ukraine begin to scatter throughout Europe and beyond, some are carrying valuable witness evidence to build a case for potential war crimes.
More and more, the people who are turning up at border crossings are survivors who have fled some of the cities hardest hit by Russian forces.
“It was very eerie,” said Ihor Diekov, one of the many people who crossed the Irpin river outside Kyiv on the slippery wooden planks of a makeshift bridge after Ukrainians blew up the concrete span to slow the Russian advance.
He heard gunshots as he crossed and saw corpses along the road.
“The Russians promised to provide a (humanitarian) corridor which they did not comply with. They were shooting civilians,” he said. “That’s absolutely true. I witnessed it. People were scared.”
Such testimonies will increasingly reach the world in the coming days as more people flow along fragile humanitarian corridors.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Wednesday said three such corridors were operating from bombarded areas and, in all, about 35,000 people got out. People left Sumy, in the northeast near the Russian border; the suburbs of Kyiv; and Enerhodar, the southern town where Russian forces took over a large nuclear plant.
“Yes, I saw corpses of civilians,” said Ilya Ivanov, who reached Poland after fleeing a village outside Sumy where Russian forces rolled through. “They shoot at civilians with machine guns.”
More evacuations were announced Thursday as desperate residents sought to leave cities where food, water, medicines and other essentials were running out.
In a staggering measure of displacement, Kyiv Mayor Vitali Klitschko on Thursday said about 2 million people, or “every second person” among the capital’s residents, have left the metro area.
In addition to the growing number of refugees, at least 1 million people have been displaced within Ukraine, International Organization for Migration director general Antonio Vitorino told reporters. The scale of the humanitarian crisis is so extreme that the “worst case scenario” in the IOM’s contingency planning has already been surpassed, he said.
Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking trained psychologists are badly needed, Vitorino said, as more traumatized witnesses join those fleeing.
Nationwide, thousands of people are thought to have been killed across Ukraine, both civilians and soldiers, since Russian forces invaded two weeks ago. City officials in the blockaded port city of Mariupol have said 1,200 residents have been killed there, including three in the bombing of a children’s hospital. In Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, the prosecutor’s office has said 282 residents have been killed, including several children.
The United Nations human rights office said Wednesday it had recorded the killings of 516 civilians in Ukraine in the two weeks since Russia invaded, including 37 children. Most have been caused by “the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area,” it said. It believes the real toll is “considerably higher” and noted that its numbers don’t include some areas of “intense hostilities,” including Mariupol.
Some of the latest refugees have seen those deaths first-hand. Their testimonies will be a critical part of efforts to hold Russia accountable for targeting civilians and civilian structures like hospitals and homes.
The International Criminal Court prosecutor last week launched an investigation that could target senior officials believed responsible for war crimes, after dozens of the court’s member states asked him to act. Evidence collection has begun.
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris on Thursday embraced calls for an international war crimes investigation of Russia, expressing outrage over the bombing of the children’s hospital in Mariupol. “Absolutely there should be an investigation, and we should all be watching,” she said.
Some countries continued to ease measures for refugees. Britain said that from Tuesday, Ukrainians with passports no longer need to travel to a visa application center to provide fingerprints and can instead apply to enter the U.K. online and give fingerprints after arrival. Fewer than 1,000 visas have been granted out of more than 22,000 applications for Ukrainians to join their families there.
Ukrainians who manage to flee fear for those who can’t.
“I am afraid,” said Anna Potapola, a mother of two who arrived in Poland from the city of Dnipro. “When we had to leave Ukraine my children asked me, ‘Will we survive?’ I am very afraid and scared for the people left behind.”
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Associated Press journalists throughout Europe contributed.
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Follow the AP’s coverage of the Ukraine crisis at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine
Source Article from https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/shooting-civilians-ukraine-refugees-abuses-83360844