January 6th

Prominent Trump supporter and 2020 election integrity skeptic Mike Lindell says he was stopped by the FBI Tuesday and had his cell phone seized.

WASHINGTON — Justice Department officials have seized the phones of two top advisers to former President Donald Trump and blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, people familiar with the inquiry said Monday.

A watchdog agency learned in February that the Secret Service had purged nearly all cellphone texts from around the time of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but chose not to alert Congress, according to three people briefed on the internal discussions.

The Secret Service on Tuesday notified the House Jan. 6 committee that it had found no new text messages related to the Capitol riot -- the same day the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) sent a letter requesting the agency investigate the deletion of some its records from Jan. 6, 2021, which drew the scrutiny of an internal watchdog.

The Secret Service erased text messages from January 5 and January 6, 2021, according to a letter given to the January 6 committee and reviewed by The Intercept. The letter was originally sent by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General to the House and Senate homeland security committees. Though the Secret Service maintains that the text messages were lost as a result of a “device-replacement program,” the letter says the erasure took place shortly after oversight officials requested the agency’s electronic communications.

In the week leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio received a nine-page memo titled "1776 Returns" that laid out detailed plans to occupy congressional office buildings to protest the counting of the Electoral College votes from the 2020 presidential election.

Internal White House records from the day of the attack on the U.S. Capitol that were turned over to the House select committee show a gap in President Donald Trump's phone logs of seven hours and 37 minutes, including the period when the building was being violently assaulted, according to documents obtained by CBS News' chief election & campaign correspondent Robert Costa and The Washington Post's associate editor Bob Woodward.

Just as expected, President Biden came out swinging in his speech Thursday morning, but still somehow missed the mark. Although he never mentioned Trump by name, the 79-year-old geriatric president tried his hardest to sound virile. "I will stand in the breach. I will defend this nation. And I will allow no one to put a dagger to the throat of American democracy," Biden announced. At this point, we're mostly surprised he managed to wake up this early.