WTF Just Happened Today

Wednesday, June 23, 2021

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1/ Nancy Pelosi plans to appoint a select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol after Senate Republicans blocked the creation of an independent, bipartisan commission. While Pelosi has not formally announced the committee, she suggested during a House Steering and Policy Committee meeting that she would move forward with plans to form an independent panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission in “pursuit of truth.” The House passed legislation last month to establish a bipartisan commission, but Senate Republicans filibustered the bill. (Politico / CNN)

2/ Biden’s Justice Department could end up defending Trump in lawsuits seeking to hold him accountable for the Jan. 6 attack, including one filed by two U.S. Capitol Police and one filed by Rep. Eric Swalwell, which alleges that Trump incited the riot in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden as the election winner. In an unrelated defamation case against Trump by author E. Jean Carroll, who contends that Trump raped her 25 years ago and then lied about it while in office, the Biden DOJ argued that presidents enjoy immunity for their comments while in office, including the right to a defense by government lawyers. The Biden Justice Department, meanwhile, declined to comment on whether it would use the same legal rationale of presidential immunity as the basis for intervening in other lawsuits Trump faces. (Reuters / Vanity Fair)

3/ Attorney General Merrick Garland backed away from a comprehensive review of actions by the Trump Justice Department, calling it “a complicated question.” Garland noted, however, that the department’s independent inspector general was already investigating related issues, including leak hunts, attempts to overturn the election, and whether Trump had improperly used the department’s powers to investigate and prosecute. (New York Times)

4/ Four Saudi operatives who killed journalist Jamal Khashoggi received paramilitary training in the U.S. a year before. The training of the Saudi Royal Guard was approved by the State Department and provided by Tier 1 Group, an Arkansas-based security company, under a license first issued in 2014, which continued through at least the first year of Trump’s term. Khashoggi was strangled and dismembered in 2018 after he entered the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. The CIA concluded that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman directed the operation. Trump later bragged that he protected the prince from Congress after ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. (New York Times)

5/ A Navy counterterrorism training document suggests that socialism is a “terrorist ideology.” A section of the training document, titled “Introduction to Terrorism/Terrorist Operations,” groups anarchists, socialists, and neo-nazis into the same “political ter...

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