17, June 2022
Trump pressured VP to illegally overturn the US 2020 election 0
Donald Trump pressured his vice president to go along with an illegal plot to overturn the 2020 US election and whipped up a mob that put his deputy’s life in danger when he refused, congressional investigators and former administration aides said Thursday.
The House committee probing last year’s attack on the US Capitol detailed how the former president berated Mike Pence for not going along with the scheme both knew to be unlawful — even after being told violence had erupted as Congress was meeting to certify Joe Biden’s victory.
At its third public hearing into the January 6, 2021 insurrection, the panel detailed a “relentless” pressure campaign by Trump on Pence — as cornerstone of a criminal conspiracy to keep the defeated president in power.
“Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done: the former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again,” panel chairman Bennie Thompson said.
“Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong.”
Trump’s lawyer John Eastman was the architect of the “nonsensical” plot, said committee vice-chair Liz Cheney, pushing the scheme aggressively despite knowing it to be unlawful.
The committee showed testimony from Pence’s general counsel Greg Jacob saying Eastman admitted in front of Trump two days before the riot that his plan would violate federal law.
‘In danger’
A desperate Trump had turned to Pence for help after dozens of legal challenges against the election were dismissed in courts across the land.
The defeated president used rally speeches and Twitter to exert intense pressure on his deputy to abuse his position as president of the Senate and reject the election results.
Members of Trump’s family were in the Oval Office on January 6 when Trump had a “heated” phone call with Pence, according to first daughter Ivanka Trump’s deposition, aired at the hearing.
She said Trump took “a different tone” than she’d heard him use before.
Nicholas Luna, a former assistant to Trump, recalled in his own deposition: “I remember hearing the word ‘wimp.'”
During his “Stop the Steal” rally later that day, Trump referenced Pence numerous times as he told his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.”
Trump’s original speech didn’t mention Pence but he ad-libbed to berate his vice president in a move Democratic committee member Pete Aguilar said helped incite the insurrection and the threats against Pence.
But Pence resisted, releasing a letter to Congress saying the vice president had no “unilateral authority” to overturn election counts.
Aguilar said an informant from the neofascist Proud Boys told the FBI the group would have killed Pence given the opportunity.
The California congressman said the mob storming the Capitol came within 40 feet (12 meters) of Pence and to “make no mistake about the fact that the vice president’s life was in danger.”
‘Pretty jarring’
Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told him about the violence erupting at the Capitol but the president tweeted anyway that Pence did not have the “courage” to overturn the election, aides told investigators in videotaped depositions.
Immediately after the tweet, the crowds at the Capitol surged forward, the committee said.
The mob threatened to hang Pence for failing to cooperate as they stormed the Capitol, even erecting a gallows in front of the building.
“What the former president was willing to sacrifice — potentially the vice president — in order to stay in power is pretty jarring,” Aguilar said.
The panel aired a video clip of a rioter saying he would “drag people through the streets” if Pence refused to overturn the election.
The committee also heard from retired federal judge J Michael Luttig, who testified that the United States would have been plunged into “a revolution within a paralyzing constitutional crisis” had Pence folded under Trump’s pressure.
Luttig, a renowned conservative legal scholar, had advised Pence at the time that his role in overseeing the ratification of the election was purely ceremonial — and that he had no power to oppose the result.
“There was no basis in the constitution or the laws of the United States at all for the theory espoused by Mr Eastman. At all. None,” Luttig said.
Trump reacted to the hearing by demanding that he receive “equal time” on the airwaves to lay out his bogus theory that the election was stolen — but opponents pointed out that he has not taken up the committee’s invitation to testify.
Source: AFP
20, June 2022
Belgium returns Lumumba tooth to family 0
Belgium on Monday handed over the last remains of slain Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba — a tooth — to his family, turning a page on a grim chapter in its colonial past.
Chief prosecutor Frederic Van Leeuw gave the relatives a small, bright blue box containing the tooth in a televised ceremony, and said legal action they had taken to receive the relic had delivered “justice”.
The tooth was placed in a casket that was then draped in the flag of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which celebrates Lumumba, who was murdered by separatists and Belgian mercenaries in 1961, as an anti-colonial hero.
Lumumba’s assassination — and the brutal history of Belgian control of the Congo — have been enduring sources of pain between the two countries.
Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo reiterated that his country’s authorities bore a “moral responsibility” over the killing.
“I would like, in the presence of his family, to present in my turn the apologies of the Belgian government,” he said.
“A man was murdered for his political convictions, his words, his ideals.”
Lumumba’s son Francois told Belgium’s RTBF broadcaster that his relatives had been waiting “more than 60 years” for this event.
“I think it will provide solace for the family and the Congolese people,” he said.
“We are opening a new page in history.”
A fiery critic of Belgium’s rapacious rule, Lumumba became his country’s first prime minister after it gained independence in 1960.
But he fell out with the former colonial power and the United States and was ousted in a coup a few months after taking office.
He was executed on January 17 1961, aged just 35, in the southern region of Katanga, with the support of Belgian mercenaries.
His body was dissolved in acid and never found.
But the tooth was kept as a trophy by one of those involved, a Belgian police officer.
The tooth was seized by Belgian authorities in 2016 from the daughter of the policeman, Gerard Soete, after Lumumba’s family filed a complaint.
‘National mourning’
The casket containing the tooth is set to be flown back to the DRC where it will be officially laid to rest at a memorial site.
The country is set to hold three days of “national mourning” from 27 to 30 June — its 62nd anniversary of independence — to mark the burial ceremony.
Lumumba’s older son Francois filed a complaint in Belgium in 2011, pointing the finger of responsibility for his father’s killing at a dozen Belgian officials and diplomats.
The investigation for “war crimes” is still ongoing but only two of the targeted officials are still alive.
A Belgian parliamentary commission of enquiry in 2001 concluded that Belgium had “moral responsibility” for the assassination and the government presented the country’s “apologies” a year later.
De Croo said Belgian officials “chose not to see, chose not to act” to stop the killing, even if they had not directly intended it to happen.
Lumumba’s children were also received Monday by Belgium’s King Philippe, who this month travelled to DR Congo to express his “deepest regrets” over the colonial past.
Historians say that millions of people were killed, mutilated or died of disease as they were forced to collect rubber under Belgian rule. The land was also pillaged for its mineral wealth, timber and ivory.
Source: AFP