The Morning Dispatch: The January 6 Committee Presses the Secret Service

Happy Thursday! There are times in your life where you will be called to stand athwart history, yelling stop. Velveeta’s introduction of a liquid mac and cheese martini—“The Veltini”—is one of those times.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The European Union proposed a plan on Wednesday that, if agreed to by member states, would encourage all states to reduce their natural gas consumption by 15 percent over the next eight months as a preemptive move in case Russia retaliates against sanctions by halting gas exports to the region. “Taking action now can reduce both the risk and the costs for Europe in case of further or full disruption,” the European Commission said while announcing proposed cuts, which would remain voluntary unless a “severe” gas shortage triggers a mandatory reduction. President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that Russia would continue to fulfill its natural gas commitments to Europe but hinted exports through the Nord Stream pipeline—which resumed its supply this morning at 40 percent capacity after 10 days of maintenance—could be reduced if sanctions prevent a pipeline component from being repaired.

• Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian warned the United States on Tuesday it would take “strong and resolute measures” if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi goes through with a reported visit to Taiwan next month, which would be the first trip to the country by a House speaker in 25 years. President Joe Biden told reporters on Tuesday he wasn’t sure of the trip’s status, but said the military thinks it’s “not a good idea right now.” The USS Benfold—a Navy warship—has sailed through the Taiwan Strait three times this week, about a month after a Chinese fighter jet reportedly had an “unsafe” and “unprofessional” interaction with a U.S. military plane in the South China Sea.

• After months of negotiations, a bipartisan group of senators introduced the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act on Wednesday, seeking to clarify ambiguities in the 1887 statute that former President Donald Trump and his allies sought to exploit after the 2020 election. The legislation, if passed this year as the senators hope, would make clear the vice president’s role in counting electoral votes is strictly symbolic and raise the threshold required for members of Congress to challenge a state’s election results.

• The National Association of Realtors reported Wednesday that the median existing-home sales price in the U.S. reached a record $416,000 in June—up 13.4 percent from a year earlier—while sales of previously owned homes declined for the fifth straight month due to rising interest rates and those higher prices.

• Foreign Secretary Liz Truss will face former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak in the race to succeed Boris Johnson as both Conservative Party leader and prime minister of the United Kingdom. About 175,000 Tory members will choose between the final two candidates, with the winner set to be announced on September 5.

• Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi resigned Thursday after his coalition in parliament fell apart. Draghi’s first resignation was rejected by Italian President Sergio Mattarella last week, but following an inability to keep his coalition government together, Mattarella accepted his resignation Thursday morning.

The Latest on the January 6 Committee and the Secret Service

Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony before the January 6 Select Committee last month was chock full of captivating details and damning allegations, but one anecdote in particular quickly became the source of controversy: a supposed scuffle between Trump and U.S. Secret Service agents in the backseat of the vehicle moving him about that day.

Hutchinson made clear she was not present in the vehicle during the alleged incident, but she testified to being filled in on it by two people who understood what had happened—Special Agent in Charge Bobby Engel and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations Tony Ornato, who was also a Secret Service Agent. Trump, she said, was supposedly desperate to go to the Capitol on January 6 after his speech on the Ellipse, but the U.S. Secret Service agents with him informed him that he couldn’t. 

“Tony described him as being irate. The president said something to the effect of, ‘I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now,’” Hutchinson—a former aide to Trump’s last chief of staff, Mark Meadows—recounted. “The president reached up towards the front of the vehicle to grab at the steering wheel. Mr. Engel grabbed his arm, said, ‘Sir, you need to take your hand off the steering wheel. We’re going back to the West Wing. We’re not going to the Capitol.’ Mr. Trump then used his free hand to lunge towards Bobby Engel.”

Trump critics circulated the story far and wide, for obvious reasons: Alongside Hutchinson’s ketchup-on-the-wall vignette, it painted the former president as an unhinged lunatic. And Trump’s insistence on going to the Capitol was consistent with a man desperate to slow down the proceedings that would officially make him a former president. But Trump’s backers sought to use the anecdote as well, after unnamed sources close to the Secret Service claimed agents were reportedly willing to testify under oath that the former president never physically attacked them or lunged for the car’s steering wheel. They quickly suggested the pushback constituted a “debunking” of Hutchinson’s claims and suggested that if those details were wrong, it cast doubt on the rest of her testimony.

But nearly a month after that initial firestorm, those Secret Service agents who were reportedly eager to correct the record with the committee have yet to do so. And on Wednesday, The Dispatch confirmed via multiple sources that at least one of them—the driver, whom we have no reason to name—has retained a criminal defense attorney, Zach Terwilliger, who specializes in government investigations. 

Terwilliger—whom Trump nominated to serve as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia in 2018 on the recommendation of Virginia’s two Democratic senators—is also representing former Trump administration press secretary Kayleigh McEnany (Terwilliger resigned as U.S. attorney on January 5, 2021). His father, George Terwilliger—who served as deputy attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration—has been representing Meadows in his interactions with the January 6 Committee.

“I am writing regarding the potential deposition of your client,” January 6 Committee Chair Bennie Thompson wrote to the younger Terwilliger in a letter dated July 14 and obtained by The Dispatch. Before the driver testified before the committee, Thompson wrote, the committee wanted to clarify two quick questions with his lawyer. But a full week later, the deposition has still yet to take place.

Why not? If the driver and the other agents are eager to provide testimony, and the committee is eager to have it, why hasn’t it happened yet? Two sources familiar with the investigation tell The Dispatch that the agents are not as enthusiastic about testifying as the earlier leaks suggested, in part due to concerns about other government investigations of the incidents. But another source familiar with the negotiations says the delay has less to do with the individual officers’ lack of cooperation and more to do with the Secret Service’s inability to provide the committee with additional text messages from the days leading up to and following January 6.

The committee had issued a subpoena last week for the records, but the agency informed lawmakers on Tuesday it would be unable to produce them: A Secret Service spokesman said the text messages were inadvertently deleted as part of a pre-planned, agency-wide mobile phone reset and system migration around that time. The National Archives has requested the Secret Service file a report within 30 days on the “potential unauthorized deletion” of agency records, and Department of Homeland Security Inspector General Joseph Cuffari is looking into the matter as well.

Regardless, the committee’s initial urgency to speak with Secret Service agents who could corroborate or contradict aspects of Hutchinson’s testimony as questions arose has been hampered by the missing records, which lawmakers now want. “Certain people have been very interested in coming in and explaining to the committee what they know,” a source familiar with the investigation said. “And some of the response has basically been, ‘We’re waiting on Secret Service to get this information. Once we get that, we’ll be back in touch.’ And so it went from a thousand miles per hour to hitting the brakes.”

That would explain why Thompson and Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney issued a statement yesterday reiterating that “every effort must be made” to recover the lost data. “The U.S. Secret Service system migration process went forward on January 27, 2021,” they wrote, “just three weeks after the attack on the Capitol in which the Vice President of the United States while under the protection of the Secret Service, was steps from a violent mob hunting for him.”

As one of the committee’s most compelling witnesses thus far, Hutchinson’s credibility is important to lawmakers on the panel—and they’ll likely look to bolster it tonight, in what is being billed as a capstone hearing summing up their case against the former president. Reps. Elaine Luria and Adam Kinzinger—both military veterans—will reportedly lead the presentation, and question former Trump Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, a former press aide, about Trump’s alleged dereliction of duty that day.

Europe Can’t Keep Cool and Carry on

In 2020, the Met Office, the United Kingdom’s weather service, released a map projecting that, by 2050, temperatures in Britain could routinely top 40 degrees Celsius—or 104 degrees Fahrenheit—the core-body-temperature threshold that defines heat stroke. This week’s weather map was eerily similar: At least 34 locations on Tuesday provisionally recorded temperatures surpassing the previous national record of 101.7 degrees Fahrenheit, including a high of 104.5 degrees. 

An unprecedented heatwave ripped through Europe this week, killing at least 1,900 people in Spain and Portugal alone—a toll that’s likely to rise in the next few weeks as countries collect data. More than 20 countries were under heat warnings on Tuesday, and—considering only 5 percent of European homes have air conditioning, and parts of Europe are as far north as Canada—the people and infrastructure are ill-equipped to handle heat topping 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The heat exacerbated existing droughts, creating tinderbox conditions conducive to wildfires, which sparked in Italy, Spain, and Portugal and other countries. In France, about 45,000 people evacuated ahead of fires. And in Spain, a train stopped mid-journey as fires burned near the tracks. London’s fire brigade had its busiest day since World War II on Tuesday, Mayor Sadiq Khan told the BBC, receiving 2,600 calls—more than seven times its usual average—as grass fires threatened the city. Fires in the hills near Athens forced several villages and a pediatric hospital to evacuate. Takis Panagopoulos, 87, told the BBC he awoke at 3 a.m. to a red sky and fled by car, leaving his collection of 1,200 theater books to burn.

For much of the week, the heat rendered it impossible for Europeans—again, most of whom don’t have air conditioning—to go about business as usual. Schools and offices closed, and nursing homes filled kiddie pools so residents could cool off by dangling their feet. Trains paused services to avoid packing passengers into uncooled cars, and to give workers time to paint tracks white to prevent them from buckling in the heat. Multiple airports in the U.K. suspended service to avoid warping the runways’ softened pavement, and direct trains from London to Scotland and London to Cambridge were still suspended Wednesday morning while engineers inspected tracks and made repairs. The heat depleted the Rhine, forcing cargo ships to reduce their loads to make it through. While energy demand spiked as people ran fans to keep cool, France had to reduce its nuclear power output because the rivers used to cool the power plants grew too hot.

The heat has now eased in much of Europe—London was a pleasant 70 degrees Fahrenheit this morning—and firefighters have gotten most blazes under control. But the United States is experiencing its own high temperatures this week as well, in Texas and Oklahoma, but also parts of the northeast that had been spared from unusually high temperatures so far this summer. About 100 million people in 28 states have been under heat advisories at some point this week—here are some tips for staying safe if you’re one of them—and the Climate Prediction Center forecasts above-average temperatures will continue into next week. 

Just like in Europe, the heat is disrupting daily life. Combined with reduced rainfall, the heat in Fort Worth, Texas, has warped the ground and burst about 180 water mains in the last month. Boston is handing out cooling kits, and Texas’ power grid has strained to keep up as residents crank up the AC. 

It’s tricky to pin any one heatwave on climate change, since natural climate variation also plays a role. A study published this month in Nature Communications found Europe has increasingly become a heatwave hotspot and linked the change to shifts in the jet stream above Eurasia that pull in and trap heat over Europe. Heatwaves also tend to occur in a vicious cycle: They dry out the soil, which then bakes still hotter the next time high temperatures roll in. 

But—as we noted in January—environmental scientists say climate change does make such extreme weather events more likely. “Climate change has already influenced the likelihood of temperature extremes in the U.K.,” Nikos Christidis, a climate scientist at the Met Office, said this week. “The chances of seeing [104-degree] days in the U.K. could be as much as 10 times more likely in the current climate than under a natural climate unaffected by human influence.” Researchers estimate the world has warmed by about 2 degrees since the Industrial Revolution, and according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average number of heatwaves in the United States has jumped from about two per year in the 1960s to six per year today. In June 2021, for example, temperatures in the Pacific Northwest reached all-time highs of 121 degrees.

“In a world where temperatures were still where they were back in the 1850s, [that heat wave] would’ve been an almost impossible event to happen, it would’ve been a one-in-150,000-year event, to have temperatures that hot in that region,” climate scientist Dr. Zeke Hausfather told The Dispatch earlier this year. “Today, with 1.2 degrees global warming, 1.5, 1.6 degrees warming in that region so far, it’s still a rare event—our best estimate now is that it was something like a one-in-1,000-year event, so still very much a black swan—but it’s 150 times more likely than it would have been without the impact of climate change.”

“If it gets a bit warmer, those odds start to change pretty dramatically,” Hausfather continued. “So what was potentially a one-in-a-1,000-year event today would be a one-in-five or one-in-10-year event if we get to two degrees warming above pre-industrial by the end of the century.”

Governments are adapting, and better weather forecasting and preparation has reduced the toll of extreme heat—a 2003 heatwave in Europe killed some 70,000 people. But adapting to more frequent extreme weather is costly and takes time. “Gradually we’re having to upgrade all the infrastructure,” British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News Tuesday, noting the improvements would take decades. “There’s a long process of replacing and upgrading it to withstand temperatures, either very hot or sometimes much colder than we were used to. And these are the impacts of global warming.”

Worth Your Time

• Ukraine has pretty thoroughly won the war of public opinion in the West, David Patrikarakos writes in The Atlantic, but Russia has launched a disinformation campaign in Africa leveraging the food shortages the war has caused. “Russia is now directing its disinformation at parts of the world where anti-Western sentiment is already strong, countries that include former colonies of the West—above all, in Africa,” Patrikarakos writes. “Anticipating a looming world food crisis, Moscow has coordinated its media outlets and social-media accounts to spin this message: Western sanctions against Russia are to blame for causing the shortages, and Ukraine is deliberately destroying grain supplies… Earlier this month, I visited Kenya to investigate these issues. In the capital city of Nairobi, fears among the population about rising food prices were everywhere apparent, even if they have not yet reached desperation level. Russian narratives are flooding Kenyan online spaces, starting with major, official sources: On April 16, the national broadcaster NTV Kenya shared a story on its Facebook page headlined, ‘Russia to Kenya: Blame US and EU for High Food, Fuel Prices.’”

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Toeing the Company Line

• Months into the baby formula shortage, it’s still a crisis. What’s going on? The reopened factory still needs time to make a dent, Scott reports in Wednesday’s Capitolism (🔒), but policy choices—including tariffs and Food and Drug Administration regulations—are still limiting the supply.

• It’s time to talk about the cosmos. Declan is joined on today’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast by Dr. John Mather and Dr. Scott Acton, the senior project scientist and the wavefront sensing and controls scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope, respectively. We’ve all seen the pictures, but what do they mean? And what questions will researchers be able to answer with the JWST that they couldn’t with its predecessors?

• AEI senior fellow Brent Orrell dropped by The Remnant for a cheerfully wonky exploration of the modern workplace. Americans are increasingly looking to work as their main source of fulfillment, but is this a healthy development? Will artificial intelligence have a positive or negative effect on the American economy? And what should we make of the “Great Resignation?”

• And on today’s episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah build on their Tuesday discussion of living constitutionalism before diving into the University of Pennsylvania academic freedom controversy and the Biden administration’s effort to clarify abortion protections with the Emergency Treatment and Active Labor Act.

• Fact check time: Justin Bieber doesn’t blame his facial paralysis on the COVID-19 vaccine as a satirical news site claimed, Khaya reports. And no, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg didn’t brag that high gas prices are forcing people to buy electric cars—instead, he suggested lowering the cost of electric vehicles is one way to ease inflation, Alec reports.

• On the site today Christian Schneider tackles the GOP’s infatuation with celebrity candidates, Nicolaus Mills explores the lessons of an essay John McCain wrote about an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, and Audrey and Price look at how Democrats are responding to Biden’s disastrous approval ratings.

Let Us Know

If you had to live in a place where you’d regularly be subjected to extreme temperatures, would you rather be extremely hot or extremely cold? (There is a correct answer.)