5.06pm GMT17:06
DC AG sues Proud Boys, Oathkeepers over Capitol attack
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The attorney general of the District of Columbia, Karl Racine, has announced that his office is suing the far right groups the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers “for conspiring to terrorize the District” in relation to the insurrection by extremist Donald Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6 this year.
Todd Ruger
(@ToddRuger)NEW: D.C. has sued the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers “for conspiring to terrorize the District” in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol Building. Seeks damages and more.
Complaint: https://t.co/gVyv9vpO58 pic.twitter.com/VPkJvqcJQh
The lawsuit has been filed in federal court in Washington, DC, adapts a law used after the US Civil War and known as the Ku Klux Klan Act, chiefly to protect government officials and people’s rights.
3.17pm GMT15:17
Over the course of a near-hour-long business meeting, the House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection outlined in detail the materials Mark Meadows had turned over to the panel – and how Meadows then promptly refused to testify about those very records.
Meadows turned over about 9,000 documents as part of a cooperation deal, the House select committee said, in his effort to engage with the inquiry to a degree in order to avoid an immediate criminal referral that befell other Trump administration aides who defied subpoenas.
Among the materials Meadows turned over to the select committee was a PowerPoint presentation titled “Election Fraud, Foreign Interference and Options for 6 JAN”, which recommended Donald Trump declare a national security emergency to unilaterally return himself to office.
But his cooperation with the select committee ended with the document production and Meadows informed the panel last week that he would not answer questions because he had learned that House investigators had subpoenaed call detail records for his personal phone.
The select committee said Meadows’ refusal to testify constituted noncompliance with his subpoena, which was first issued in September, and initiated proceedings to recommend that the House hold him in contempt of Congress.
2.57pm GMT14:57
Bennie Thompson, the chair of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, said in an opening statement before the panel recommended Mark Meadows’ referral to the justice department that Donald Trump’s former White House chief of staff displayed willful noncompliance in his defiance of his subpoena.
“It comes down to this,” Thompson said. “Mr Meadows started by doing the right thing: cooperating. He handed over records that he didn’t try to shield behind some excuse. But in an investigation like ours, that’s just a first step.
“When the records raise questions – as these most certainly do – you have to come in and answer those questions. And when it was time for him to follow the law, come in, and testify on those questions, he changed his mind and told us to pound sand. He didn’t even show up.”
The select committee said in the contempt report they were seeking charges against Meadows after he attempted to obstruct the investigation in myriad ways, from refusing to testify to frustrating their efforts to locate and discover documents relevant to the Capitol attack.
The select committee also said Meadows should be prosecuted since he refused to testify even about information he voluntarily provided to the panel through his own document production and conceded were not covered by claims of executive privilege advanced by Trump.
