A federal jury on Tuesday found that Donald Trump sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll, a writer who accused the former president of attacking her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.
The verdict in the civil trial marks the first time that Trump, who has been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, has been held legally responsible for sexual assault. And it adds fresh tarnish to the former president’s reputation as he seeks to regain the White House amid a tide of legal troubles.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Carroll testified that Trump raped her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room after a chance encounter one evening in the spring of 1996. The jury found that Carroll did not prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Trump raped her. But the jury did find him liable for sexual abuse and for defamation. The defamation count arose from a statement Trump made last year in which he called Carroll’s allegation a “hoax.”
“I filed this lawsuit against Donald Trump to clear my name and to get my life back,” Carroll said in a statement after the verdict. “Today, the world finally knows the truth. This victory is not just for me but for every woman who has suffered because she was not believed.”
Her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, said the verdict was a triumph for Carroll as well as “for democracy itself, and for all survivors everywhere.”
“No one is above the law,” she said, “not even a former President of the United States.”
In a social media post Tuesday, Trump called the verdict “a disgrace.” He added: “a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time!”
Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina said Trump would appeal the verdict. “They rejected the rape claim and they always claimed this was a rape case, so it’s a little perplexing. But we move forward,” Tacopina said.
He added he had spoken to the former president. “He’s firm in his belief, like many people are, that he cannot get a fair trial in New York City based on the jury pool. And I think one could argue that’s an accurate assessment based on what happened today.”
Trump did not testify in court and did not even attend the trial. His legal team did not call any witnesses. The case hinged on the testimony of Carroll, who told the jury over the course of three days on the witness stand how her run-in with Trump at the luxury department store turned into a brutal attack in a dressing room in the store’s lingerie department.
“I’m here because Donald Trump raped me,” Carroll, 79, told the jury. Referring to a book she wrote in which she detailed the alleged incident, she said: “And when I wrote about it, he said it didn’t happen. He lied and shattered my reputation. And I’m here to try to get my life back.”
In vivid and, at times, tearful testimony, Carroll recounted how Trump shoved her against the dressing room wall, banging her head, and pinned her there with his body weight. She said he then pulled down her tights, inserted his fingers into her vagina and then penetrated her with his penis. The assault lasted a few minutes, she testified, before she managed to free herself and flee the store onto Fifth Avenue.
She said she contemporaneously disclosed what had happened to two friends, both of whom testified on her behalf, but didn’t tell anyone else about it for more than two decades, when she went public with her account by publishing an excerpt of her book in New York Magazine in 2019.
Asked if she had stayed quiet for so long because she was worried about how others would react to her story, she rejected that idea. “No, I knew how others would react,” she said. “Women who are raped are looked at as soiled goods. They’re looked at as less.”
Though jurors never saw Trump in person, they did hear from him in the form of a videotaped deposition, footage from a presidential debate and campaign rallies, and the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording from 2005 in which Trump, caught on a hot mic, boasted that when it comes to women, if you’re a star you can “grab them by the pussy.”
In his deposition, Trump denied having raped Carroll or even knowing her, calling her allegation “the most ridiculous, disgusting story.”
“It’s just made up,” he said.
His lawyers, meanwhile, argued that Carroll’s testimony wasn’t credible, largely because Carroll couldn’t pinpoint certain pieces of information, including the precise date of the alleged attack. And they questioned other aspects, such as her claim that she didn’t recall seeing any other shoppers or sales attendants during the encounter at Bergdorf’s.
Carroll’s attorneys leaned heavily on the “Access Hollywood” tape, arguing that it amounted to “a confession,” as one of them put it, that Trump had a habit of sexually assaulting women and that he relied on a playbook of sorts to do so. To bolster that argument, her attorneys called two other Trump accusers as witnesses: Jessica Leeds and Natasha Stoynoff.
The nine-person jury delivered its unanimous – as required by law – verdict after an eight-day trial. Jurors in the case remained anonymous throughout the trial — even to Carroll, Trump and their lawyers — after U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan ordered that their identities be kept secret due to “a very strong risk that jurors will fear harassment.”
Though the statute of limitations had long expired on Carroll’s battery claim, she was able to sue Trump under a New York state law that opened a one-year window beginning in November 2022 during which people can sue their alleged abusers for sexual assault.
For Carroll, the courtroom experience was bittersweet. Asked during her testimony whether she was glad she spoke out against Trump, she broke into tears.
“I’ve regretted this about 100 times,” she said, pausing. “But in the end, being able to get my day in court, finally, is everything to me,” she said, her speech interrupted by crying. “So I’m happy.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
“The Proud Boys didn’t want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out. And they didn’t want it to get out,” Mundell said in the interview, noting that the thousands of messages they reviewed — extracted from the phones of Tarrio and his co-defendants — were peppered with blank slots where exchanges had been deleted.
“And that’s why the government couldn’t present too much of the evidence that they had already deleted, because it was unrecoverable,” Mundell said. “So, they definitely didn’t want people to know.”
And that wasn’t the only absence of evidence that factored into the jury’s deliberations. Mundell said that he was persuaded by the fact that there wasn’t a single message among the Proud Boys leaders — even after their members contributed to the chaos at the Capitol — urging their allies to withdraw from the riot or stay away from the violence.
“That factored in for me. It showed an absence of evidence of standing down. No one says, ‘no, don’t do this. We’re not going to do this.’ There was none of that,” Mundell said. “And that was probably because they never said it. And the things that were affirming that they were going to be violent. They just kind of let it happen.”
Mundell’s comments are the first insight into the jury’s deliberation in the case of Tarrio and four Proud Boys who prosecutors say were the most crucial drivers of the violence that unfolded at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The Justice Department contends that Tarrio, along with leaders Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, spearheaded a conspiracy to prevent Joe Biden from taking office — and were prepared to use force to get their way. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of numerous felonies for his own role in the attack — which included igniting the breach of the Capitol itself when he smashed a Senate window with a riot shield.
Prosecutors showed evidence that the Proud Boys spent weeks before Jan. 6 discussing their desire to prevent Biden from taking office, and on Jan. 6, hundreds — in a crowd led by Nordean, Biggs and Rehl — marched to the Capitol even while Trump was speaking to his supporters near the White House. At the Capitol, members of the Proud Boys marching group were present — and often involved — in the crucial moments when the mob breached police lines and many later entered the Capitol, led by Pezzola.
Mundell said he understood the jury’s work on the case as a significant moment for the country.
“I think it’s huge. It’s something that needed to happen,” he said. “I definitely think it’s important because otherwise, somebody might get the idea that this is okay to do again.”
Although the jury deliberated for about a week, Mundell said it didn’t take long for jurors to agree that the group had committed a seditious conspiracy.
“The first day we elected a foreman. After that, we all put out our initial impressions of the evidence. We all voted and most people saw the evidence pointed towards seditious conspiracy. By the second day, we had pretty much established guilty verdicts on the conspiracy,” he said.
Mundell said the group agreed that Pezzola was not guilty of seditious conspiracy because he wasn’t closely tied enough to Tarrio or the group’s leaders — Pezzola took the stand and emphasized that he had only been in the Proud Boys for a month before Jan. 6 and barely knew his co-defendants.
“Another factor was just that he wasn’t the brightest bulb on the porch. And may not have been bright enough to really know about the plan,” Mundell said. “So I said, well, poor guy. He should’ve listened to his father-in-law, who told him ‘don’t go.’”
Mundell said the jury simply did not buy the defense’s claims that the Proud Boys were only interested in First Amendment-protected protests and to make their voices heard in Washington.
“You don’t stop the steal by breaking into the Capitol and over-running the police lines and beating up on and spraying the police,” he said.
He also indicated that a crucial piece of evidence unearthed by an open-source online sleuth late in the Proud Boys trial factored heavily into the jury’s consideration of Rehl’s role in the attack. While Rehl, who took the stand in his own defense, had emphasized repeatedly that he committed no violence, prosecutors displayed a newly discovered video that appeared to show Rehl pepper spraying toward a line of outnumbered police officers at one of the early moments of the riot.
“Rehl really got caught on cross examination after he was adamant that he never sprayed a police officer … On cross that all fell apart when the video came out and it showed that he was spraying towards the cops,” Mundell said.
Mundell also emphasized that the jury considered very little about Trump’s role in Jan. 6, despite one “anti-Trump” juror’s effort to tie the former president to the Proud Boys’ actions. To be sure, Trump was a persistent undercurrent in the case — prosecutors noted that his invocation of the Proud Boys during a September 2020 debate turbocharged the group’s recruitment efforts. And his Dec. 19, 2020 tweet urging supporters to descend on Washington to protest the election results on Jan. 6, 2021, was the moment that jumpstarted the Proud Boys’ seditious conspiracy.
But Mundell said those two episodes were the extent of Trump’s relationship to the case.
“[T]he evidence doesn’t show anything that Trump did other than ‘be there, will be wild’ and ‘stand back and stand by,’” he said. “That was his contribution to this case. Other than that, everyone was focused. I think they got a fair trial.”
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
In the deposition, conducted at Mar-a-Lago in October, Kaplan asked Trump about the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording from 2005 in which Trump can be heard saying, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” adding: “Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.”
“Well, historically that’s true with stars,” Trump replied after watching a clip of his comments.
When Kaplan pressed him on whether he stood by the statement that a star could “grab them by the pussy,” the former president said: “Well, I guess if you look over the last million years, that’s been largely true — not always true, but largely true, unfortunately or fortunately.”
“And you consider yourself to be a star?” she asked.
“I think so, yeah,” Trump said.
During the deposition, Kaplan questioned him about several other women who have accused him of sexual assault, women Trump has characterized as not being his “type.”
Growing belligerent, Trump told Kaplan herself that “you wouldn’t be a choice of mine, either, to be honest.” He added: “I wouldn’t in any circumstances have any interest in you.”
Trump has defended himself by saying Carroll, too, isn’t his “type,” but earlier in the deposition, after he was shown a photograph of himself engaging with Carroll at a party, he confused the image of her with that of one of his ex-wives, Marla Maples.
“It’s Marla,” he said, looking at the photo. “That’s Marla, yeah. That’s my wife.”
“I take it the three women you’ve married are all your type?” Kaplan asked him later. “Yeah,” he replied.
Calling Carroll “mentally sick” and a “nut job,” Trump suggested, as he had previously, that he didn’t know her.
“She’s accusing me of rape, a woman who I have no idea who she is,” he said. “She’s accusing me of rape — the worst thing you can do, the worst charge.”
Starting on Wednesday afternoon and continuing Thursday, the jury watched about 45 minutes of excerpts of the deposition. On Thursday, jurors also heard from witnesses including Carol Martin, a longtime friend of Carroll’s. Martin testified that Carroll told her about the alleged rape at Bergdorf’s a day or two after it happened.
“I’m here … to reiterate and remember what my friend E. Jean Carroll told me … about 27 years ago,” Martin said on the witness stand.
She added: “I believed it then and I believe it today.” After an objection from Trump’s lawyer, the judge — without elaboration — instructed the jury to disregard her last comment.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Mike Pence testified before a federal grand jury on Thursday in Washington about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, according to a source familiar with the matter, a day after an appeals court rejected a last-ditch motion to block his appearance.
The former vice-president’s testimony lasted for around seven hours and took place behind closed doors, meaning the details of what he told the prosecutors hearing evidence in the case remains uncertain.
His appearance is a moment of constitutional consequence and potential legal peril for the former president. Pence is considered a major witness in the criminal investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, since Trump pressured him to unlawfully reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden at the joint session of Congress, and was at the White House meeting with Republican lawmakers who discussed objections to Biden’s win.
The two interactions are of particular investigative interest to Smith as his office examines whether Trump sought to unlawfully obstruct the certification and defrauded the United States in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results.
Pence had privately suggested to advisers that he would provide as complete an account as possible of what took place inside and outside the White House in the weeks leading up to the 6 January Capitol attack, as well as how Trump had been told his plans could violate the law.
His appearance came the morning after the US court of appeals for the DC circuit rejected an emergency legal challenge seeking to block Pence’s testimony on executive privilege grounds, and Trump ran out of road to take the matter to the full DC circuit or the supreme court.
The government has been trying to get Pence’s testimony for months, starting with requests from the justice department last year and then through a grand jury subpoena issued by Smith, who inherited the complicated criminal investigation into Trump’s efforts to stay in power.
The subpoena came under immediate challenges from Trump’s lawyers, who invoked executive privilege to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony, as well as from Pence’s lawyer, who argued his role as president of the Senate on 6 January meant he was protected from legal scrutiny by the executive branch.
Both requests to limit the scope of Pence’s testimony were largely denied by the new chief US judge for the court James Boasberg, who issued a clear-cut denial to Trump and a more nuanced ruling to Pence that upheld that he was protected in part by speech or debate protections.
Still, Boasberg ruled that speech or debate protections did not shield him from testifying about any instances of potential criminality.
The former vice-president’s team declined to challenge the ruling. But Trump’s legal team disagreed, and filed the emergency motion that was denied late on Wednesday by judges Gregory Katsas, Patricia Millett and Robert Wilkins.
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Starting weeks after the 2020 election, Trump tried to cajole Pence into helping him reverse his defeat by using his largely ceremonial role of the presiding officer of the Senate on 6 January to reject the legitimate Biden slates of electors and prevent his certification.
The effort relied in large part on Pence accepting fake slates of electors for Trump – now a major part of the criminal investigation – to create a pretext for suggesting the results of the election were somehow in doubt and stop Biden from being pronounced president.
The pressure campaign involved Trump, but it also came from a number of other officials inside and outside the government, including Trump’s lawyer John Eastman, other Trump campaign-affiliated lawyers such as Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and dozens of Republican members of Congress.
Pence was also unique in having one-on-one discussions with Trump the day before the Capitol attack and on the day of, which House January 6 select committee investigators last year came to believe was a conspiracy that the former president had at least some advance knowledge.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Pence was at the courthouse for more than five hours. His appearance before the grand jury was confirmed by two people who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
His testimony began just hours after a federal appeals court rejected Trump’s emergency bid to block Pence from testifying or limit the scope of prosecutors’ potential questions.
A three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an order late Wednesday denying the former president’s last-ditch effort. Though the order remains sealed to protect grand jury secrecy, POLITICO had previously confirmed Trump’s appeal, which followed a district court judge’s order that required Pence to testify.
Prosecutors are interested in Trump’s increasingly desperate effort to seize a second term he didn’t win, which intensified after he lost dozens of court battles aimed at overturning the results. Trump, aided by attorneys and allies pushing fringe legal theories, pressed Pence to use his perch on Jan. 6, when he was required to preside over a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes certifying Biden’s victory.
As Jan. 6 approached, Trump pushed Pence to assert the power to reject or delay counting Biden’s electoral votes. But Pence resisted his pressure, ultimately determining he had no power to decide which electoral votes to count or reject. Trump lashed out at Pence after his decision became clear on the morning of Jan. 6, inflaming a crowd that Trump had sent to the Capitol to protest the election results. Later, that crowd would form a mob that overran the building, sending Pence and lawmakers fleeing for safety
Aides to the former vice president did not comment on the appeals court’s decision or Pence’s appearance but have previously indicated Pence would follow the orders of the court.
Smith subpoenaed Pence in February, prompting separate challenges by both Trump and Pence.
While Trump argued that Pence’s testimony should be barred or limited by executive privilege, Pence took a different tack. He contended that his role presiding over Congress on Jan. 6 — fulfilling his constitutional role as president of the Senate — entitled him to immunity under the so-called “speech or debate” clause, which protects Congress from executive branch intrusion.
Chief U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg rejected Trump’s argument but agreed with Pence that the congressional immunity applied on certain topics — a historic decision that for the first time found vice presidents enjoy a form of privilege. Although Boasberg’s ruling was narrower than Pence’s attorney, Emmet Flood, had argued for, Pence opted not to appeal the decision.
Trump earlier this month sought an emergency order from the court of appeals blocking Boasberg’s ruling. But Wednesday’s order — a unanimous ruling by Judges Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Gregory Katsas — rejected that effort. Millett and Wilkins are Obama appointees, while Katsas is a Trump appointee.
Betsy Woodruff Swan contributed to this report.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
The ruling is a victory for Jack Smith, the special counsel probing Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election. Smith subpoenaed Pence in February, prompting separate challenges by both Trump and Pence.
While Trump argued that Pence’s testimony should be barred or limited by executive privilege, Pence took a different tack. He contended that his role presiding over Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 — fulfilling his constitutional role as president of the Senate — entitled him to immunity under the so-called “speech or debate” clause, which protects Congress from Executive Branch intrusion.
Chief U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg rejected Trump’s argument but agreed with Pence that the congressional immunity applied on certain topics — a historic decision that for the first time found vice presidents enjoy a form of privilege.
Although Boasberg’s ruling was narrower than Pence’s attorney, Emmet Flood, had argued for, Pence opted not to appeal the decision.
Trump earlier this month sought an emergency order from the court of appeals blocking Boasberg’s ruling. But Wednesday’s order — a unanimous ruling by Judges Patricia Millett, Robert Wilkins and Gregory Katsas — rejected that effort. Millett and Wilkins are Obama appointees, while Katsas is a Trump appointee.
It’s unclear when Pence will appear before the grand jury, but Trump’s previous emergency appeals — which have nearly all failed when it comes to similar sealed orders — have occurred just days before witnesses were scheduled to appear.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
Donald Trump’s lawyer told a New York jury on Tuesday that the advice columnist E Jean Carroll conspired with other women to falsely accuse the former president of rape because they “hate” him for winning the 2016 election.
The opening day of a civil trial in a Manhattan federal court heard that Carroll is suing Trump for battery and defamation “to clear her name, to pursue justice and to get her life back” after the former president allegedly raped her in a New York department store in 1996 and then denied it years later.
But Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, told the jury of three women and six men that Carroll filed the lawsuit for political ends, to sell a book and for public attention.
Tacopina said that the rape accusation was invented by Carroll and two other women who are expected to testify that she told them about the assault shortly afterwards.
“They schemed to hurt Donald Trump politically,” he said.
Tacopina suggested to the jury that Carroll first accused then president Trump of rape after meeting George Conway who was a vocal critic who was married to Kellyanne Conway, one of the president’s closest aides in the White House. The judge upheld an objection to the claim by Carroll’s lawyers. It is not clear if Tacopina will return to it when Carroll gives evidence.
Carroll accuses Trump of assaulting her in a dressing room of the New York department store Bergdorf Goodman in 1996 after they ran into each other at the entrance and he asked for help in choosing a present for a friend.
Carroll sat stony faced at the front of the courtroom as her lawyer, Shawn Crowley, told the jury that Trump manoeuvred her client into a dressing room and then attacked her. The lawyer said Trump banged Carroll’s head against the wall, pinned her arms back with one hand, pulled her tights down with the other and then rammed his fingers into her vagina.
Crowley said that Carroll kicked Trump and tried to knee him off but he was too strong for her.
“He removed his hand and forced his penis inside her,” the lawyer told the jury.
Crowley addressed what she said would be two of the biggest questions on the jurors minds. Why did Carroll go into the dressing room with Trump? And why didn’t she report the alleged rape to the police at the time?
An artist’s drawing of the court proceedings. Photograph: Jane Rosenberg/Reuters
The lawyer said that when Trump suggested Carroll try on a see-through bodysuit, she pushed it back at him and said he should be the one to try it on as it was his colour. Trump then took her by the arm and led Carroll to the dressing room.
“To her, the situation was harmless and funny,” said Crowley. “The truth is she didn’t see Trump as a threat.”
Crowley said that Carroll did tell two friends after the assault. One advised her to go to the police. The other said to keep quiet because Trump was a powerful man. Crowley said that Carroll was “filled with fear and shame” that kept her silent for decades.
“In her mind, for many years, she thought what happened to her was her fault,” Crowley told the jury.
When Carroll did decide to speak out after Trump’s election in 2016 and with the rise of the #MeToo movement, she faced a barrage of “vicious attacks” by the president.
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Crowley said that Trump’s deposition late last year will provide damning evidence against him. She noted that, in denying the alleged assault, the former president had said Carroll was not his type.
“We all know what that means. He was saying she was too ugly to assault,” the lawyer told the jury.
Crowley said that during the deposition, Trump was shown a photograph of himself meeting Carroll in the late 1980s. But he mistook the woman in the picture for his second wife, Marla Maples, who Crowley said was “very much his type”.
Trump’s lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, ridiculed Carroll’s account and accused her of abusing the justice system to express her hate for the former president.
“You learn that E Jean Carroll can’t tell you the date she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the month she claims to have been raped. She can’t tell you the season. She can’t even tell you the year,” he said, pointing out that the plaintiff has previously said it was 1995 or 1996.
Tacopina told the jury that it was not believable that no one in a major department store saw Carroll and Trump together and that there were no staff in the area where the alleged assault took place. He also said that it was standard practice at Bergdorf Goodman to keep changing rooms locked until a customer asked to be let in and yet Carroll said the door was open.
Tacopina questioned Carroll’s version of why she did not call the police.
“E Jean Carroll once called the police on teenagers who vandalised her mailbox but not when she was violently raped,” he told the jury.
Earlier, the jury of three women and six men was chosen from a pool of about 100 people who were questioned about whether they could set aside their political beliefs and views of the #MeToo movement to decide the case fairly.
They were also asked if they supported Antifa, Jane’s Revenge, Redneck Revolt, the Ku Klux Klan or other extremist groups. Perhaps disappointingly for Trump and Carroll, no one in the jury pool said they followed them on social media or had read their columns or books. But nearly half had watched Trump presenting The Apprentice television programme.
The trial continues.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Pezzola would subsequently enter the Capitol — arriving at the precise moment that Sen. Chuck Grassley, then the third in line to the presidency, was being evacuated. And he would record a video celebrating the breach of the Capitol that has been a key piece of evidence for prosecutors in the seditious conspiracy trial against Pezzola and four Proud Boys leaders: Enrique Tarrio, Joe Biggs, Ethan Nordean and Zachary Rehl.
In addition to seditious conspiracy, the five men are charged with attempting to obstruct Congress’ proceedings that day and aiding in the destruction of government property.
Pezzola used the early portion of his testimony to separate himself from the group’s leadership.
“The craziest damn thing is I never even knew these guys before I met them at the courthouse,” Pezzola said.
Pezzola’s turn on the stand is a climactic moment for the trial, and potentially the last before the four-month-long trial goes to the jury. Prosecutors have portrayed the Proud Boys as a sinister force on Jan. 6, plotting to do whatever they could to disrupt the transfer of power from Trump — who they viewed as an ally — to President Joe Biden. Trump’s call for a “wild” protest in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6 was the moment the group’s leaders decided to take measures to help Trump disrupt the incoming Biden presidency, prosecutors have alleged.
The group also took a sharp turn against police in mid-December 2020, when four members of the Proud Boys were stabbed outside a bar following a pro-Trump event and the alleged perpetrator was not apprehended, prosecutors contended.
The case relied heavily on thousands of Telegram messages sent among members of the group describing their intentions and coordinating rallies and protests related to the election results. They also showed ample video of the group’s movements in Washington D.C. on Jan. 6. The government’s key witness in the case, Proud Boy leader Jeremy Bertino, testified that he knew the group’s goal was to derail the transfer of power, even though there were no explicit plans relayed to the group’s broader membership.
The defense has contended that the group’s role has been inflated, that they’re more akin to a drinking club whose members use a lot of hyperbole and overheated language that they didn’t intend to back up.
Pezzola’s testimony — expected to last at least deep into Wednesday — continued in that vein. He said he viewed the Proud Boys as a forum for camaraderie and brotherhood, not a force for violence. He said that on Jan. 6, he never had any inkling of a plan or conspiracy to stop Congress from convening to count electoral votes.
He acknowledged trespassing and crossing police lines at least twice. And he admitted that he shattered “one pane of glass” of the Senate window. But after that, he said, he “wandered around lost with no idea where I was going, took some pictures.”
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Trump and Pence had both challenged the subpoena — but on entirely distinct grounds. Trump contended that his conversations with Pence in the weeks preceding the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol should be shielded by investigators because of executive privilege, which is intended to preserve the confidentiality of some presidential communications. Trump has lost a series of sealed executive privilege fights in recent months, failing to convince federal district and appellate judges to support his privilege assertions.
Pence, however, had argued that the subpoena for his testimony was problematic for a different reason: his role as president of the Senate. The Constitution, he argued, makes the vice president a hybrid creature of the executive and legislative branch. Pence’s role on Jan. 6 — to preside over Congress’ counting of electoral votes — fell squarely within his congressional duties, entitling him to the protection of the Constitution’s “speech or debate” clause, which protects lawmakers from criminal inquiries that pertain to their official responsibilities.
As a result, Pence’s attorney contended that Pence should be shielded from the special counsel’s subpoena for any testimony related to his Jan. 6 role. Though the precise contours of Boasberg’s ruling remain unknown, a person familiar with the decision indicated that it agreed with aspects of Pence’s argument.
Boasberg found — for the first time in American history — that vice presidents do enjoy some congressional immunity for their role as president of the Senate. Pence allies say Baosberg’s decision was narrower than they preferred — opening Pence up to questions about his legislative duties they had hoped would be shielded — but they have largely treated it as a victory on the principle Pence set out to defend.
“In the Court’s decision, that principle prevailed,” O’Malley said. “The Court’s landmark and historic ruling affirmed for the first time in history that the Speech or Debate Clause extends to the Vice President of the United States.”
Though Pence’s decision means he’s likely to testify, Trump may still opt to appeal Boasberg’s ruling that executive privilege does not block Pence’s testimony.
Pence has long signaled he was willing to testify to the grand jury about topics that weren’t shielded by privilege. Smith is likely to press Pence about Trump’s weeks-long bid to convince him to single-handedly derail the transfer of power by refusing to count Joe Biden’s electoral votes on Jan. 6. Pence’s refusal to do so drew Trump’s fury and caused a mob that had gathered outside the Capitol that day to hunt for the vice president.
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( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
