Trump, Heeding His Lawyers’ Advice, Cancels News Conference About Georgia Election Results

President Trump has canceled the planned press conference he had said would present “Irrefutable” evidence of voter fraud in Georgia and result in his “complete EXONERATION” from accusations of meddling with the election results, saying he will instead present the evidence in court. The former president is also raising allegations that the House January 6 Committee improperly discarded evidence it gathered while investigating the attack on the Capitol. This question could prove relevant to Mr. Trump’s defense in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution, as the January 6 Committee turned over much of its findings to the Justice Department, which, as New York Magazine recently reported, appears to have used the material to prepare the indictment of the former president. Following his indictment in the Georgia matter earlier this week, Mr. Trump promised the public that “A Large, Complex, Detailed but Irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia is almost complete.”Mr. Trump claimed that the report, which was to take place on Monday, would prove that “all charges should be dropped against me and others.”Yet Thursday evening, Mr. Trump walked back his promises, saying that “my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable and Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud and Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment.”Mr. Trump went on to denounce the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, who secured the fourth criminal indictment against him, calling her a “publicity and campaign finance seeking D.A., who sadly presides over a record breaking Murder and Violent Crime area, Atlanta.”Mr. Trump went on to claim in a Truth Social post Thursday that representatives, which he refers to as “hacks and thugs,” on the January 6 Committee “illegally destroyed all of their records and their documents.”“So they took all of their records all of their documents they reported it, tried to get me indicted — and probably did — and then they destroyed everything,” Mr. Trump said. “The fake political indictment must be immediately withdrawn.”This is not the first time that Mr. Trump has made this claim. On Wednesday, he claimed that the committee had “Discarded, Deleted, Thrown Out” evidence in an attempt to hide evidence from him.Mr. Trump appears to be repeating a claim from the Chairman of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, Representative Barry Loudermilk, who told Fox News that he was not supplied a well organized set of records, which Fox News ran under the headline “J6 Committee failed to preserve records, has no data on Capitol Hill security failures, GOP charges.”Mr. Loudermilk said that his committee was having difficulty addressing how members of the mob that descended on the Capitol on January 6 were “able to get into the Capitol” because documents supplied by the January 6 Committee were unorganized.“Nothing was indexed. There was no table of contents index. Usually when you conduct this level of investigation, you use a database system and everything is digitized, indexed,” Mr. Loudermilk said. “We got nothing like that. We just got raw data.”Mr. Loudermilk then described that he had received what he considers an incomplete set of records from the committee claiming to have only received two and a half terabytes of data from the committee. The chairman of the January 6 Committee, Congressman Bennie Thompson, maintains that he delivered four terabytes of data to Mr. Loudermilk’s office.Mr. Loudermilk’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Sun.The dispute between Mr. Loudermilk and Mr. Thompson relates in part to questions about what records congressional committees are obligated to preserve, a standard that varies widely not only by Congress but by committee.House Rule VII, the relevant House rule, states that a committee should preserve an “official, permanent record of the committee (including any record of a legislative, oversight, or other activity of such committee or a subcommittee thereof).”What qualifies as constituting a “permanent record” of a committee, however, is not a consistent standard. While some committees only preserve their final reports and hearing notices, others might include correspondences, transcripts of hearings, and staff notes.Whether Mr. Trump is referencing the foggy definition of “permanent record,” is reiterating Mr. Loudermilk’s claims, or is leveling unrelated allegations, however, isn’t clear.

Trump, Heeding His Lawyers’ Advice, Cancels News Conference About Georgia Election Results

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