Glenn Kirshner doesn't sugarcoat it in this recent YouTube podcast, "Justice Matters."
GLENN KIRSHNER: Well friends it looks like somebody on Team Trump took a page out of the book “Witness Tampering for Dummies.”
We now know that Team Trump is tampering with witnesses. Witnesses who are appearing before the January 6th Select Committee investigating the insurrection. Here's the new reporting by Reuters: headline, “January 6 Committee may make criminal referral on witness tampering per Liz Cheney” and that article begins, “The congressional panel investigating the January 6 2021 US Capitol attack may make a criminal referral to the Justice Department recommending that anybody who tried to influence testimony be prosecuted, Representative Liz Cheney said in an interview broadcast on Thursday. The witness tampering issue emerged during the January 6 Select Committee's sixth hearing on Tuesday when Cheney revealed that some witnesses reported receiving veiled threats from allies of former President Donald Trump to ‘do the right thing.’”
And here are two samples of that witness tampering revealed by Representative Cheney: the first one is from one of the witnesses. “What they said to me as long as I continue to be a team player, they know that I'm on the team, I'm doing the right thing, I'm protecting who I need to protect, you know, I'll continue to stay in good graces in Trump World, and they have reminded me a couple of times that Trump does read transcripts, and just to keep that in mind as I proceed through my depositions and interviews with the committee.”
And then the second example is from a perpetrator, somebody who is tampering with the witnesses, a person -- wonder who that could be -- “You have your deposition tomorrow, he wants me to let you know that he's thinking about you. He knows you're loyal and you're going to do the right thing when you go in for your deposition.”
And friends this kind of language is what I would call “heartland witness tampering language.” I spent 30 years, a professional lifetime, working with witnesses and victims. I had witnesses tampered with. I had them intimidated, obstructed, impeded. I had them threatened. I had them assaulted, and worse, much worse. And sometimes witness intimidation witness tampering takes the form of somebody telling a witness you better not testify or else we're going to hurt you. But that is actually less usual than what we see here: the kind of language Team Trump is using. “We know you're loyal, we know you're on the team, we know you're gonna protect the person that needs to be protected, we know you're gonna do the right thing.” And by those words, you know precisely what's being communicated: “Do the wrong thing. Be loyal to Trump, protect Trump, lie for Trump. He reads the transcript, he's got his eyes on you, you want to remain in good graces. And Trump World? Do the right thing? We're not foolish, friends. We know that means “do the wrong thing.”
And let me tell you this gets my blood boiling. Because it's hard enough for witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson to sit there under the white-hot glare of the media attention, doing the hard work, the dangerous work, that cowardly people like Mark Meadows and Pat Cippilone won't do. And then to be tampered with, to be threatened for it. Witness tampering is a clear and present danger to the integrity of any investigation, whether congressional or criminal. And the Department of Justice needs to jump on this now, hard, with both feet, figuratively speaking. This does not call for the immediate launching of a six-month-long grand jury probe.
Let me tell you how law enforcement is supposed to work, and I know because this is the way it worked for 30 years when I was involved in enforcing the laws of the United States. When a witness is tampered with like this, the FBI should interview that witness immediately, should take the information, put it in an affidavit in support of an arrest warrant for the person who did the tampering. Present that application to a judge. Ten times out of 10 a judge will sign an arrest warrant and tomorrow morning at 6 00 am somebody's going to get their door knocked on loudly and they're going to be arrested for witness tampering. That's the way law enforcement is supposed to work when it comes to tampering with witnesses, which, as I say, represents a clear and present danger to the integrity of the J-6 investigation. That's the way law enforcement is supposed to work, because justice matters, and protecting witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson and the other thousand-plus witnesses who are doing the hard work of testifying in an effort to save our democracy? It all matters.
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