Most Viewed Videos
The House panel probing last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol is promising a “minute-by-minute” account of Donald Trump’s actions throughout the rampage, turning its focus Thursday on those crucial hours at the White House to boost the case that the former president had supported — if not instigated — the violence of Jan. 6.
In a prime-time hearing designed to maximize viewership, the select committee will examine the frantic 187 minutes between the start of the melee and Trump’s unhurried effort to defuse it with the release of a short video urging the rioters to “go home.”
Investigators will press their case that Trump’s refusal to intervene more quickly is further evidence that the former president was squarely on the side of the protesters, even as their demonstration against Trump’s defeat escalated into a violent mob attack on Congress — one that threatened the lives of lawmakers and his own vice president.
“The story we’re going to tell tomorrow is that in that time, President Trump refused to act to defend the Capitol as a violent mob stormed the Capitol with the aim of stopping the counting of electoral votes and blocking the transfer of power,” a select committee aide said on a preview call with reporters.
“One of the main points that we’re going to make here is that President Trump had the power to call off the mob — he was the sole person who could call off the mob — and he chose not to.”
The hearing — the eighth in a series — is expected to wind down the narrative laid out by the committee over the course of the last two months, when it examined the events leading up to Jan. 6 and the major players involved in Trump’s effort to remain in power.
With their focus on Jan. 6 itself, investigators are aiming to dissect the chaos at the White House as anxious staff sought Trump’s intervention to end the violence, only to be dismissed by an angry president. The 187 minutes under scrutiny will feature his actions at the White House in the time when he returned from his speech at the Ellipse, at 1:10 p.m., to when he sent out a video asking his supporters to stand down, at 4:17 p.m.
The committee is expected to hear from two members of Trump’s staff who resigned to protest how he handled Jan. 6: Matthew Pottinger, former deputy director for the National Security Council, and Sarah Matthews, then deputy press secretary.
The panel is also expected to show ample footage of its July 8 deposition with former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who was one of the few figures to confront Trump in the White House during the riot.
The committee has previously described Pottinger as “in the vicinity of the Oval Office at various points throughout” Jan. 6. And snippets of testimony from both Pottinger and Matthews show they were critical of Trump’s actions that day, including his decision to fire off a tweet criticizing his vice president, Mike Pence, who quickly became a target of the mob.
“One of my staff brought me a printout of a tweet by the president and the tweet said something to the effect that Mike Pence, the vice president, didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done. I read that tweet and made a decision at that moment to resign,” Pottinger told the committee behind closed doors.
“That’s where I knew that I was leaving that day, once I read that tweet.”
Matthews also described the Pence tweet as a pivotal moment in the day’s long unfolding.
“It was clear that it was escalating and escalating quickly. So then when that tweet, the Mike Pence tweet was sent out, I remember us saying that that was the last thing that needed to be tweeted at that moment. The situation was already bad. And so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that,” she said in an earlier deposition aired by the committee.
The other major players in the White House that day — figures likely to be featured on Thursday — include Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff; Cassidy Hutchinson, a top Meadows aide; and Ivanka Trump, Trump’s elder daughter.
“We’re going to demonstrate who was talking to him and what they were urging him to do in that time period. We’re going to talk about when he was made aware of what was going on in the Capitol. We’re going to hear testimony from individuals who spoke to the president. We’re going to hear testimony from individuals who were in the West Wing, what the president was doing, what his aides were doing, what his family and his allies were doing,” the aide said.
The makeup of the committee will look slightly different for Thursday’s prime-time hearing, after Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) tested positive this week for COVID-19. Thompson is isolating, but will lead the panel virtually.
Reps. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) will play an elevated role in walking through the evidence of the hearing.
“It’s pretty simple: He was doing nothing to actually stop the riot,” Luria said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Although Thursday’s hearing will cap the topics the committee had outlined at the outset, lawmakers have said it’s unlikely to be its last. The panel also plans additional hearings to introduce an interim report in the fall, and may also hold additional hearings prior to that release.
While Thursday’s hearing is expected to focus on the events of Jan. 6, the committee is also interested in Trump’s actions in the two weeks after that day, leading up to the inauguration of President Biden. It’s unclear if the panel will explore the aftermath this week, but members are making clear that it’s on their radar.
“We have a broad investigation and that is something of concern,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).
Source Article from https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3568083-jan-6-hearing-to-focus-on-trumps-frantic-187-minutes/
Ukraine, battling a fierce Russian invasion, would benefit immensely from NATO’s defining credo, which says that “an armed attack” against any NATO ally is considered an attack against them all. But President Vladimir V. Putin has tried to justify his invasion by saying that Ukraine’s potential NATO membership threatens Russia, and Washington and its European allies do not want to further antagonize Russia and risk transforming the conflict into an expanded war.
Even without the high-stakes geopolitical risks, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic that has struggled with endemic corruption since gaining independence, would find it difficult to meet several necessary requirements to join NATO, including the need to demonstrate a commitment to the rule of law. Sweden and Finland, in contrast, have developed over decades into vibrant and healthy liberal democracies.
And any decision to admit a country to NATO requires unanimous consent from all of NATO’s 30 member states, which Ukraine is very unlikely to secure.
Here’s why Ukraine faces an uphill struggle to join one of the century’s most-vaunted security clubs:
Mired in war, Ukraine has set aside the goal of joining NATO.
Finland joined NATO’s Partnership for Peace program along with Sweden in 1994 and has become ever closer to the alliance without joining it. Finland’s leaders have declared their support for joining NATO, and those in Sweden are expected to do the same within a matter of days.
But for Ukraine, being mired in an all-out war with Russia makes its NATO aspirations far more complicated. In February, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine stressed the ambition to join NATO, an aspiration fixed in Ukraine’s constitution since 2019. But this March, as war with Russia raged, Mr. Zelensky backed down from that hope, signaling that his country needed to accept that it may never join NATO.
The comments appeared to be a nod to the Kremlin’s demand that Ukraine give up the aim of joining NATO as a precondition to stopping the war. That intention was reiterated during peace talks in late March in Istanbul between Ukraine and Russia, during which Ukrainian officials said their country was ready to declare itself permanently neutral — forsaking the prospect of joining NATO, a key Russian demand.
Even if Ukraine still wanted to join NATO, it may not meet the requirements.
To meet one of the three main criteria for entry into NATO, a European nation must demonstrate a commitment to democracy, individual liberty and support for the rule of law. While Ukrainian leaders say they have met that threshold, some American and European officials argue otherwise.
In a 2020 analysis, Transparency International, an anticorruption watchdog, ranked Ukraine 117th out of 180 countries on its corruption index, lower than any NATO nation at the time.
Some Western officials also question whether Ukraine could meet another criterion to contribute to the collective defense of NATO nations, even though Ukraine sent troops to the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and has also shown its military prowess during the Russian invasion.
Whatever Ukraine’s military capabilities, there are other geopolitical hurdles. The alliance wants to avoid greater Russian hostility, and Ukraine would almost certainly have trouble meeting the third criterion: winning approval from all of NATO’s members. France and Germany have in the past opposed Ukraine’s inclusion, and other European members are skeptical — a likely dealbreaker if Ukraine wanted to join.
The United States has been lukewarm about Ukraine joining NATO.
President Vladimir V. Putin’s insistence that he needed to prevent Ukraine from joining NATO appeared to be a pretext for the war. But the United States has also been deeply wary of Ukraine joining the alliance.
In 2008, NATO promised Ukraine and Georgia that they could someday become members, without specifying a date. But the alliance has done little to make that promise a reality.
American officials say they will not appease Mr. Putin by undermining a policy enshrined in NATO’s original 1949 treaty, which grants any European nation the right to ask to join. The White House insists it will not allow Moscow to quash Kyiv’s ambition to join the alliance.
Nevertheless, in January, a month before Mr. Putin launched his full-scale invasion, difficult negotiations between the United States, Russia and European members of NATO made it clear that the Biden administration had no immediate plans to help bring the former Soviet republic into NATO.
President Biden, wary of expanding U.S. military commitments, has been reluctant to support Ukraine’s membership. Analysts say two decades of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have cooled his fervor for expanding NATO.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/05/12/world/russia-ukraine-war-news