Post Politics Now Jan. 6 committee to hold hearing Tuesday on ‘recently obtained evidence’

Federal agents last week seized the cellphone of lawyer John Eastman, the attorney who, according to witnesses who have spoken to the Jan. 6 committee, lobbied for Vice President Mike Pence to declare President Donald Trump the winner of the 2020 election.

Eastman, who committee witnesses also say was behind a plot to introduce false electors to change the results of the election, is fighting to block the phone seizure, Devlin Barrett reports:

Eastman’s lawyer, Charles Burnham, filed papers in federal court in New Mexico on Monday asking a judge to order the cellphone returned to Eastman. It was seized pursuant to a search order when he left a restaurant last Wednesday — a day in which federal agents around the country delivered subpoenas, executed search warrants, and interviewed witnesses in a significant expansion of the criminal probes surrounding Jan. 6.

That same day, federal agents conducted a search at the northern Virginia home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official whom Trump considered appointing to run the department because he was willing to further a scheme to declare the election results invalid in some key states.

The investigations come in the wake of revelations made by the congressional Jan. 6 committee tasked with investigating the deadly attack on the Capitol. Over the past few weeks, the committee has revealed the extent Eastman was willing to go to flip the election falsely in favor of Trump.

Monday’s development is not directly related to the Jan. 6 committee, given that the Justice Department is conducting its own inquiry into the actions that led to the riot.

Monday’s court filings also suggest the Justice Department’s inspector general has become an important player in the criminal probes surrounding Jan. 6, because Eastman says his phone was taken by FBI agents acting on behalf of the inspector general. A spokeswoman for the inspector general declined to comment.

Read more about these investigations here.

Harris County, Tex., Sheriff Ed Gonzalez, Biden’s nominee to run U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, abruptly withdrew from consideration for the job after months of uncertainty.

His decision leaves ICE, the Homeland Security agency that detains and deports undocumented immigrants, without a confirmed director for the sixth consecutive year.

Gonzalez informed Biden of his decision on Sunday, nearly a year after his Senate confirmation hearing, saying he decided to bow out “after much prayer and deep consideration.”

“I arrive at this difficult decision with the understanding that the challenges of preserving both the integrity of America’s borders and our country’s global standing as a beacon of light for those seeking freedom and opportunity have never been greater,” he wrote, according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post’s Maria Sacchetti:

Gonzalez, who runs the nation’s the third-largest sheriff’s agency, said he had decided to devote his full attention to rising crime in the Houston area, where he was first elected sheriff in 2016 and is now in his second term. Homicides are up, as they are in other cities nationwide, he wrote, and the jail population has swelled “beyond capacity,” “placing unprecedented strain” on the jail staff.

During his confirmation process in July 2021, Republicans questioned Gonzalez, a career law enforcement officer, for withdrawing his sheriff’s office from a voluntary program that helps ICE locate immigrants in county jails who are accused of crimes and could be deported. But Gonzalez testified before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee that he would uphold the “rule of law” and would not end the program, if confirmed.

The committee approved his nomination along party lines, but he did not receive a floor vote and the president had to resend his nomination to Congress in January.

Read more about his withdrawal here.

A judge in Utah has temporarily blocked the state’s abortion trigger law for two weeks.

Judge Andrew Stone, of Utah’s 3rd District Court, made the ruling during an emergency Monday hearing over a lawsuit brought forth by Planned Parenthood Utah and the state’s chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. The plaintiffs filed an emergency notion to block the state’s trigger law from going into effect.

Utah’s trigger law bans abortions with only a few exceptions — for rape and incest, or in cases of severe fetal “brain abnormality.” The law also criminalizes abortion providers.

In their lawsuit, Planned Parenthood and the ACLU argued that the “trigger law,” which went into effect when the Supreme Court ruled to overturn Roe on Friday, violated Utah’s constitution.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, state Attorney General Alan Wilson said the state can enforce its Fetal Heartbeat Act, which was blocked by an injunction. In a statement, Wilson said the measure allows the state to ban abortions after “the point at which a fetal heartbeat is detected and requires an abortionist to give a mother the opportunity to view an ultrasound [and] hear her child’s heartbeat.”

The law has exceptions for cases of rape or incest “as long as the fetus is fewer than 20 weeks along,” or in cases in which an abortion is necessary to save the mother’s life.

And in Indiana, state Attorney General Todd Rokita asked courts to lift injunctions against several of the state’s abortion laws.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) signed an executive order Monday that, among other things, protects abortion providers and explicitly states that New Mexico will not comply with other states’ abortion-related extradition requests.

Abortion remains legal in New Mexico. Ahead of Friday’s Supreme Court decision, Democrats in the state had already worked to secure protected abortion by eliminating what Lujan Grisham described as an “antiquated trigger ban on abortion.”

The executive order signed Monday goes further, giving abortion providers protection against the criminalization of the procedure that could soon happen in other states.

Among the states bordering New Mexico, Oklahoma has a full ban, already in effect before Friday’s decision; Texas has a trigger ban that is being enforced; and Arizona has a ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

Vice President Harris, in an interview with CNN, said the Biden administration is not considering providing access to abortions on federal lands in states that block the procedure.

“It’s not [something] right now what we are discussing,” Harris told CNN’s Dana Bash.

Several Democrats, including a number of more liberal lawmakers such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), floated the possibility that Biden could expand access to abortions on federal land in red states.

In an interview with ABC’s “This Week,” Warren said the president should “make abortion as available as possible with the tools he has, including medication abortion, including using federal lands as a place where abortions can occur.”

Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez has, in a New York rally and on Twitter, called for the administration to open abortion clinics on federal land.

But Harris did not entertain the idea long during her conversation with Bash, moving on instead to highlight the importance of electing Democrats during this year’s midterm election, listing the Senate races in Georgia, North Carolina and Colorado as opportunities for Democrats to pick up seats.

“We need to change the balance and have pro-choice legislators who have the power to make decisions about whether this constitutional right will be in law,” she said.

Harris, who is the head of the Senate, did not mention the possibility of eliminating the filibuster to codify abortion rights.

The vice president also said the administration will secure women’s right to travel across states for an abortion, saying the issue could go to the courts. She also said the administration would work to ensure that women still have access to medication abortions.

The Biden administration’s coronavirus vaccination mandate for federal workers will not take effect at least until the fall.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit said Monday that it would reconsider a ruling by a three-judge panel that would have allowed the mandate to go into effect. The court, meanwhile, scheduled oral arguments for the week of Sept. 12.

That will be almost exactly a year after President Biden issued an executive order requiring that 2.1 million executive branch employees be vaccinated unless they qualified for exemptions on religious or medical grounds.

Biden originally gave employees until late November to comply or else face progressive discipline starting with counseling through unpaid suspensions and then, potentially, firing. Just before that deadline, the White House told agencies not to take disciplinary actions until after the turn of the year.

At that time, administration figures showed 92.5 percent of employees had received at least one vaccine dose and that an additional 4.7 percent had requested or been given exemptions. Those figures have not been publicly updated since.

In January, some agencies started taking initial disciplinary steps against the remainder — issuing letters of warning — but later that month, a federal district judge in the Southern District of Texas issued an injunction against the mandate. That injunction barred discipline except where an agency had issued a vaccine mandate for its employees ahead of Biden’s order; the largest of those affected were medical personnel in the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A legal back-and-forth followed.

First, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit refused the Justice Department’s request to lift the injunction on an emergency basis, but in April, a separate panel acted to restore Biden’s order. The court majority held that the Civil Service Reform Act, the general body of laws governing executive branch workers, requires that any challenge to the order go through the government’s internal appeals channels and not directly to the courts.

In its order Monday granting a rehearing, the court vacated the ruling by the three-judge panel to restore the mandate, leaving the injunction in effect pending a decision by the full court.

Were the Supreme Court justices under oath when they testified at their confirmation hearings? If so, could they be held in contempt of Congress or impeached for lying under oath? asks Walter from San Francisco.

All Supreme Court nominees are under oath when they testify before the Senate during their confirmation hearings.

We are assuming, from Walter’s question, that he’s bringing this up because two of those nominees-turned-justices — Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh — suggested during their hearings that they would, if confirmed, respect the precedent left by Roe v. Wade.

Kavanaugh was asked whether he believed Roe was settled law during his 2018 hearing. Roe, he said, was “settled as a precedent of the Supreme Court [and is] entitled to respect under principles of stare decisis.”

“One of the important things to keep in mind about Roe v. Wade is that it has been reaffirmed many times over the past 45 years,” Kavanaugh told senators.

Gorsuch, during his 2017 confirmation process, made similar statements. While Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in 2020, gave more abstract answers on the issue, all agreed that the ruling was established precedent.

But none told Congress that they wouldn’t rule to overturn Roe. They also did not explicitly state that Roe was settled law. All three chose their words carefully, which brings us to Walter’s question: They did not technically lie.

In the wake of Friday’s decision, some lawmakers say they feel “misled” by the three justices. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) outright accused justices of lying to Congress on Friday. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a Republican who supports some abortion rights, said Gorsuch and Kavanaugh, during meetings ahead of their confirmations, reassured her that they posed no threat to Roe.

Kavanaugh specifically, the New York Times reported, told her during one of these meetings that he was a “don’t-rock-the-boat kind of judge.”

“I feel misled,” Collins told the Times.

She may feel misled, but the justices’ under-oath statements to the Senate on their views that Roe was precedent did not specifically outline any plans to uphold it. As such, Democrats are not likely to have the grounds to initiate an impeachment process in the House against the justices, let alone the two-thirds majority needed in the Senate to convict.

The White House said Monday that public tours of the building will return to a full schedule beginning July 19.

The free tours will be offered Tuesday through Saturday from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m., excluding federal holidays. Tours have been largely paused since March 2020, because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The White House had reopened to limited tours earlier this spring, allowing visitors into the building Friday and Saturday mornings from 8 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

In a statement, the White House said that tour requests, as in the past, must be submitted a minimum of 21 days in advance to a member of Congress and no more than 90 days in advance of the requested tour date.

The administration said it will continue to monitor the coronavirus situation and “adjust availability of the public tours as necessary to adhere to the latest health guidance.”

Visitors can choose to wear a face mask, but doing so will not be mandatory.

The Trump administration briefly paused the break on tours before vaccines were made available, reopening to limited tours on Sept. 12, 2020, with social distancing and masks required.