As Seth Abramson outlines in his latest Proof article ("The Biggest Lie Trump Just Told The Washington Post Was About January 6. It Now Requires An Investigation."), if the Committee, having elicited testimony from Secret Service Agent Anthony Ornato, is discussing subpoenaing Trump, that is a big fucking deal.
Abramson wrote about the Secret Service and its possible involvement in Trump's attempted coup more than a year ago. On Thursday evening, he tweeted: "Let me tell you what's important about Ornato: his testimony can confirm that Trump knew there was going to be violence at the Capitol—before January 6."
The Washington Post reported on December 30, 2020 that "the Secret Service [under Trump] also took the unprecedented step of allowing [a] former detail leader [Ornato] to temporarily leave his job to become a White House political adviser" during 2020.
Ornato was "hired as White House deputy chief of staff. In that role, he helped coordinate a controversial June photo opportunity in which Trump strode defiantly across Lafayette Square to pose with a Bible after the park was forcibly cleared of peaceful protesters . . . [and] helped coordinate numerous rallies across the country during the pandemic, per Trump's wishes".
The Post further stated that Ornato was "slated to return to the Secret Service [after January 20, 2021]" – a situation which caused the Biden team some concern, as noted by Abramson in his article's conclusion, in which he drops a bomb (my emphasis in bold):
As we learned many months ago, [after taking office] Joe Biden had to engage in a large-scale, unprecedented culling of the Secret Service to weed out certain individuals who otherwise would have been serving very close to the new president. It appears, from major media reports, that this culling went beyond the usual process we see from an incoming president (especially one previously a vice president) with respect to them selecting as bodyguards those individuals with whom they feel most comfortable.
What Biden did was something else. As reports confirmed, some percentage of the culling effort made by the Biden administration had to do with its concern that there had been an unprecedented degree of partisan infiltration of the Secret Service. One imagines that the Biden administration eventually came to be aware of something the Biden transition team couldn't have known back in November or December of 2020: that even Vice President Pence was afraid of the radicalization Trump had brought to the Secret Service, refusing to get into a car driven by a Trump loyalist inside the Service on January 6 for fear that he would be whisked off to Maryland (which he had been told would happen if he did get in the car) but also not returned to D.C. in order to better effectuate Trump's coup plot (which no agent would admit to him on January 6).
The above facts confirm that an investigation of Secret Service complicity in the coup plot that failed on January 6, 2021 must go beyond Anthony Ornato, who at most was the instrument of men far more powerful than he. Congress must find out why Pence was afraid to get into a Secret Service-driven car in the midst of a national emergency that normally would've seen him obeying Secret Service directives without question (a tradition Trump and his co-conspirators, including Ornato, would have counted upon).
So what did Pence know about Trump's Secret Service—and its plans for January 6—that caused him to break with protocol in such an unprecedented way? (We learned in January of this year that the House January 6 Committee now wants to speak to Pence.)
The House January 6 Committee must also find out more from the leaders of the Stop the Steal "movement" about their self-admitted contacts with the Secret Service, all of which—and I mean all of which—fell outside the normal operation of the USSS, if in fact the events of January 6 unfolded as the three men have now publicly said they did.
And of course all of the foregoing makes it more important than ever that Congress demand an interview with Donald Trump under oath.
Trump could very soon be staring down the barrel of having to testify under oath before the House Committee. The Committee has been saying that it will hold public hearings in the next few months. Any questioning of Trump should be televised.
The Committee has conducted over 800 interviews and depositions of witnesses relating to January 6, including more than a dozen former Trump White House staff members.
Also, Trump is being investigated by the Justice Department and the FBI over his stealing 15 boxes of presidential records, which included documents that were classified at the highest level, and keeping them at his home in Florida.
The Justice Department has begun taking steps to investigate former president Donald Trump’s removal of presidential records to Mar-a-Lago. This is a BIG DEAL. https://t.co/f8Lq8NauNK
— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) April 8, 2022
The FBI is preparing to investigate the handling of classified material that was found in Donald Trump’s Florida home after he left office. https://t.co/EsU5ohR4Za
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 8, 2022
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