J. Scott Applewhite 

Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., center, speaks as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol continues to reveal its findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, June 23, 2022. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., left, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., right, listen. —AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite

WASHINGTON — More witnesses are coming forward with new details on the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot following former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s devastating testimony last week against former President Donald Trump, says a member of a House committee investigating the insurrection.

The panel already has subpoenaed former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, who investigators remain hopeful will appear Wednesday for a deposition, and said it would also welcome follow-up details from Secret Service members with Trump that day.

Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., cited Hutchinson’s testimony that Trump wanted to join an angry mob of his supporters who marched on Jan. 6, 2021, to the Capitol, where they rioted, as particularly valuable in “inspiring” more people to step forward as the committee gets set for at least two public hearings this month.

“Every day we get new people that come forward and say, ‘Hey, I didn’t think maybe this piece of the story that I knew was important,’” he said Sunday. “There will be way more information and stay tuned.”

The committee has been intensifying its yearlong investigation into the Jan. 6 attack and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The next hearings will aim to show how Trump illegally directed a violent mob toward the Capitol on Jan. 6 and then failed to take quick action to stop the attack once it began. Over the weekend, Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the committee’s vice chair, made clear that criminal referrals to the Justice Department, including against the Republican former president, could follow.

The committee also has been reviewing new documentary film footage of Trump’s final months in office, including interviews with Trump and members of his family.

Kinzinger, in a television interview, declined to disclose the new information he referred to and did not say who had provided it. He said nothing had changed the committee’s confidence in her credibility.

“There’s information I can’t say yet,” he said. “We certainly would say that Cassidy Hutchinson has testified under oath, we find her credible, and anybody that wants to cast disparagements on that, who were firsthand present, should also testify under oath and not through anonymous sources.”

In a separate interview, another committee member, Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said: “We are following additional leads. I think those leads will lead to new testimony.”

In Hutchinson’s appearance before the committee, she painted a picture of Trump as an angry, defiant president who was trying to let armed supporters avoid security screenings at a rally on the morning of Jan. 6 to protest his 2020 election defeat to Democrat Joe Biden.

According to Hutchinson, Cipollone was concerned that Trump would face criminal charges if he joined his supporters in marching to the Capitol.

Legal experts have said Cassidy’s testimony is potentially problematic for Trump as federal prosecutors investigate potential criminal wrongdoing.

Cheney said in an interview aired Sunday that the committee was still considering whether to issue recommendations to the Justice Department, indicating “there could be more than one criminal referral.”

Committee members said they are hopeful Cipollone will come forward.

“He clearly has information about concerns about criminal violations, concerns about the president going to the Capitol that day, concerns about the chief of staff having blood on his hands if they didn’t do more to stop that violent attack on the Capitol,” Schiff said. “It’s hard to imagine someone more at the center of things.”

In her testimony, Cassidy recounted a conversation with Tony Ornato, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for operations, who, she testified, said Trump later grabbed at the steering wheel of the presidential SUV when the Secret Service refused to let him go to the Capitol after the rally.

That account was disputed, however. Bobby Engel, the Secret Service agent who was driving Trump, and Ornato are willing to testify under oath that no agent was assaulted and Trump never lunged for the steering wheel, a person familiar with the matter said. The person would not discuss the matter publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“We had interviewed Mr. Ornato several times,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and member of the panel. “His memory does not appear to be as precise as hers. We certainly would welcome them to come back if they wish to do that.”

The committee has also been working on setting up an interview with Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the conservative activist and wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She was asked to speak to the committee after disclosures of her communications with Trump’s team in the run-up to and on the day of the insurrection at the Capitol.

Kinzinger appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Schiff was on CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Cheney appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and Lofgren spoke on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

egribbin / Jose Luis Magana 

Abortion rights activists protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, June 24, 2022. — AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

egribbin / Jose Luis Magana 

Abortion-rights activists protest outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Saturday, June 25, 2022. — AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Thomas Figueroa always knew he didn’t want children. Growing up in Central Florida, he remembers his classmates getting pregnant as early as middle school and had considered getting a vasectomy for the past few years.

But after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade on Friday, he rushed to schedule one. He registered Monday for a vasectomy with Doug Stein, a Florida urologist known as the “Vasectomy King” for his advocacy of the procedure.

“It is something I put on the backburner of my mind until very recently, when the Supreme Court decision happened,” said Figueroa, 27, who lives in Tampa. “That was basically the triggering factor right there. It pushed my mind to say: ‘OK, I really do not want children. I’m going to get this vasectomy now.’”

Figueroa is not alone. Urologists told The Washington Post that they have seen a spike in requests for the procedure in response to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Stein said that before Friday, he received four or five vasectomy requests a day. Since the court’s decision was announced, that number has spiked to 12 to 18 requests per day.

“It was very, very noticeable Friday, and then the number that came in over the weekend was huge and the number that is still coming in far exceeds what we have experienced in the past,” Stein told The Post. “Many of the guys are saying that they have been thinking about a vasectomy for a while, and the Roe v. Wade decision was just that final factor that tipped them over the edge and made them submit the online registration.”

Some physicians are facing confusion and fear in a post-Roe world. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) joined several other professional organizations and medical journals in the past few days in warning that the ruling will affect health care beyond abortion, posing new risks for patients and possibly increasing maternal mortality. Doctors are concerned about the impact on situations including miscarriage and in vitro fertilization. The practice of medicine will be reshaped, the group said, or even contradicted “by laws not founded in science or based on evidence.”

A vasectomy is a form of permanent sterilization that prevents sperm from flowing through the vas deferens and combining with semen. The National Center for Health Statistics reported that in 2002, the main reasons women provided as to why they were relying on a vasectomy as a form of birth control is that they or their partners already had all the children they wanted. But from 2011 to 2015, other reasons for relying on vasectomies, including medical reasons and problems with other types of birth control, became more common.

There has been a push for vasectomies in anticipation of Roe being overturned and antiabortion legislation taking effect in states across the country. Stein and other vasectomy proponents have taken to the streets and child support offices to encourage people to get the procedure.

Stein said his practice is booked through the end of August with vasectomy appointments, prompting him to open up more days in his schedule to accommodate patients who have recently registered. He and his associate, John Curington, said the decision overturning Roe has directly factored into their patients’ requests for vasectomies. Men under the age of 30 who do not have children are requesting vasectomies in greater numbers than before, the physicians said.

“I’d say at least 60 or 70% are mentioning the Supreme Court decision,” Curington said. “And a few of them have such sophistication as young men that they actually are thinking about Justice Thomas and his opinion that contraception may fall next. And that’s shocking. That’s something that doesn’t enter into our conversations ever, until this week.”

Amanda Omelian, 33, and her boyfriend, Eric Nisi, have also always known they didn’t want children. Nisi, 29, had been considering getting a vasectomy for the past few years but said the Supreme Court decision is what prompted him to take the next step.

Omelian, who is from Homosassa, Fla., and is already on two forms of birth control, worries that Florida will soon restrict access to these contraceptives in addition to restricting abortion rights with its 15-week abortion ban that was recently passed. That led Nisi to register for a vasectomy Tuesday.

The sharp increase Stein’s practice has reported is consistent with what other urologists say they’ve seen since the draft of the Dobbs opinion was leaked last month.

Philip Werthman, a Los Angeles urologist, also reported a “300 to 400%” increase in the number of vasectomy consultations he has performed. Esgar Guarín, an Iowa-based urologist who trained under Stein and specializes in vasectomies, said he has seen a “200 to 250%” increase in traffic on his website offering information specifically about vasectomies.

Marc Goldstein, a urologist and director of the Center for Male Reproductive Medicine and Microsurgery at Weill Cornell Medical Center in New York, said he usually sees twice as many patients per week for vasectomy reversals compared to vasectomies.

“Now it’s the other way around,” he said. “So it’s been a dramatic shift. And this [decision] is only going to further impact that in terms of increasing requests.”

It isn’t the first time a significant news event has caused an uptick in vasectomies. Goldstein said vasectomy requests spiked after the Great Recession of 2008 as more men began to worry about raising additional children while under financial stress. When the coronavirus pandemic began in 2020, there was also an increase in requests with more men working from home, Guarín said.

“When something like that in the news happens, we get a bump,” Guarín said, adding that he has seen a consistent increase in vasectomy requests per year. “The overall upward trend continues but the dramatic bumps don’t.”

The Affordable Care Act doesn’t require all insurance companies to cover the deductible for vasectomies, unlike women’s contraceptives, which are covered as “preventive services.” Nisi, who is between jobs and doesn’t have health insurance, said he is paying out-of-pocket for the procedure, which costs just under $600 at Stein and Curington’s practice.

Figueroa, an IT professional, said he also decided to pay out-of-pocket despite having health insurance from his employer.

“That’s no worry for me at all,” he said, adding that the ease of the procedure motivated him to get it done. “Birth control for a woman doesn’t really need to be necessary for something, in my opinion, that is as cheap and very quick.”

Urologists attribute the general increase in vasectomies to an evolution in attitudes among men.

Werthman emphasized that the recent uptick in vasectomy requests in California has come despite the fact that the right to an abortion in the state will probably remain unaffected by the Supreme Court decision. “If there’s any state in the country that is not going to allow abortion rights to be abrogated, I think it would be California,” he said.

Werthman, who performed vasectomies for two decades at Planned Parenthood, said he believes there has been a “change in the psyche of men,” and that they are more concerned about their role in family planning than they were previously.

Nisi said he doesn’t want Omelian, his girlfriend, to “stress over getting pregnant” because of a potential lack of access to birth control in the future. “The world is a scary place and you don’t know what’s coming, because it seems like we’re moving backward.”

Figueroa echoed the sentiment, saying what has unfolded in the days since last week acted as the final push he needed to register for the vasectomy he had long been considering.

“This is probably one of the very, very rare things in politics that actually does affect me very personally and very hard,” he said. “It really woke my eyes up.”

New AARP Pennsylvania poll shows voters over 50 could play a major role in the November election.

— PHOTO COURTESY OF AARP

A new survey commissioned by AARP Pennsylvania showed what Black Pennsylvanian voters over the age of 50 are thinking about as they get ready to vote in November.

The survey shows that Black voters over 50 are headed into the 2022 general election supporting lieutenant governor John Fetterman for the US Senate and Attorney General Josh Shapiro for governor. Both are Democrats.

In the poll, Shapiro leads Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano among Black voters over 50, 78% to 17%. In the race for the U.S. Senate, Fetterman leads Republican TV personality Mehmet Oz, 76% to 16%.

Two-thirds of Black voters also said that they’re not happy with what’s happening with the economy, both nationally as well as when within the state. They also place voting rights, Social Security and Medicare at higher levels of importance to their vote this November.

“Black voters consistently show up to the polls, so it’s important that candidates pay attention to their concerns, as election season heats up,” said AARP Pennsylvania state director Bill Johnston-Walsh.

“But, their vote is not guaranteed for one party or another,” he added. “With the price of necessities like groceries, gas and prescription drugs skyrocketing, Black voters in Pennsylvania are worried about these issues and want to see elected officials provide solutions.”

Among all Pennsylvania voters over 50, Fetterman leads Oz 50% to 44% in the open race for the U.S. Senate and Shapiro narrowly leads Mastriano, 49% to 46%.

AARP’s poll also reveals a gap in gender, with 54% of women supporting Fetterman and 40% supporting Oz in the U.S. Senate race. In the gubernatorial race, 55% of women support Shapiro and 41% support Mastriano.

Among men, 51% support Mastriano and 49% support Oz while 43% support Shapiro and 45% support Fetterman.

Shapiro also holds a much higher percentage of support from African Americans over the age of 50 with 78%, while Mastriano only holds 17%. In the race for U.S. Senate, Fetterman leads Oz 76% to 16%.

Almost 85% of respondents said the country is heading on the wrong track and more than 75% said the state is going in the wrong direction. Only 30% said they felt the economy is working for them.

Enthusiasm is also high among likely voters for both parties, with 84% of Democrats and 87% of Republicans saying they are “extremely motivated” to vote for governor and Congress in 2022.

In the 2018 midterm elections, Pennsylvanians aged 50 years and older made up 61% of all voters in the state.

“People are looking at those pocketbook issues and what is impacting them on a day-to-day basis,” Johnston-Walsh said. “They’re also seeing that the approval rating for President Biden is also underwater.

“I think that’s having an impact on the state races like the federal state senate seat as well as the governor’s race,” he added. “The biggest thing all of the polls show is the power of the voice and how residents over 50 believe their voice is connected with their vote.”

AARP commissioned Fabrizio Ward and Impact Research to conduct the survey. The survey, which reached nearly 1,400 Pennsylvania voters, was conducted this month via landline, cell phone and text message from June 12-19.

It included a statewide representative sample of 500 likely voters, an oversample of 550 like voters aged 50 and older and an additional oversample of 328 Black likely voters aged 50 and older. AARP plans to do another survey on the General Election in mid-October.

“We want to make sure that all Pennsylvanians know that it’s their privilege and their right to vote,” Johnston-Walsh said.

“We also want to make sure all of the campaigns realize that the 50+ voter is not happy with what’s going on in the country but especially the state,” he added. “They have a lot of issues that are impacting them and they want to be heard.”

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