FAST FORWARD: JANUARY 6 SELECT COMMITTEE HEARINGS

 

So what did we learn from the first day of the House Jan. 6 Select Committee hearings?

Some revelations were pretty astonishing, even by Trump standards. According to chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi) and vice chairwoman Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), the committee's investigation so far has found:

-- There was a sprawling plot to commit seditious conspiracy against the United States, to overthrow the duly elected government and install Trump as an illegal president. This plot was overseen and coordinated by Trump, who carried out a sophisticated seven-part plan (see below) with the help of shameless allies designed to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.

His actions were unconstitutional and illegal.

-- Testimony by Trump advisers revealed that when Trump found out that the Capitol rioters were chanting "Hang Mike Pence," he said, "Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it."

Think about that for a moment. The president of the United States was so desperate to hang onto power that he actually said that his vice president deserved to be murdered by a bloodthirsty mob of crazies because he refused to go along with the president's corruption.

So what was the seven-part plan, according to the committee?

1. Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Trump knew full well that he had lost the election.

The Trump campaign’s internal data expert, Matt Oczkowski, told him so.

One of his campaign lawyers, Alex Cannon, who was responsible for assessing allegations of election fraud, told him so.

The Trump campaign's general counsel, Matt Morgan, who reviewed all of the fraud allegations and other election arguments, told him so.

His attorney general, Bill Barr, told him so. "I told him that it was crazy stuff," Barr told the committee in taped testimony, "and they were wasting their time on that and that it was doing great, great disservice to the country."

After Barr resigned on Dec. 23, the acting attorney general who replaced him, Jeff Rosen, and the acting deputy, Richard Donoghue, also told Trump he had lost. Many times.

Trump knew.

But rather than accept the election results, Trump instead chose to become the first president in the history of the United States to dishonor the peaceful transfer of power.

And according to the committee, he engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information – to convince huge numbers of Americans that the election had been stolen from him through fraud. It was what came to be known as The Big Lie.

"I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations," Barr testified in a videotaped deposition. "But they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count, and that these machines, controlled by somebody else, were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense."

And it was this coordinated campaign of lies that led directly to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

2. Trump corruptly planned to replace the acting attorney general so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.

Leading up to Jan. 6, Trump ordered top Justice Department officials to announce that the election was corrupt "and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen" (aka his spineless henchmen). Those Justice officials refused. So Trump decided to replace them with people as corrupt as him who would do his bidding.

He planned to fire the acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen -- who had refused to go along with his sedition -- and offered the job to Jeffrey Clark, an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department who had already been devising ways to cast doubt on the election.

Trump wanted the willing Clark to send a letter to election officials in Georgia and five other states claiming that the Justice Department had "identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election." It urged those officials to therefore withdraw their electoral votes for Biden.

It was a lie. Trump knew it, and Clark knew it.

In fact, Justice officials had repeatedly told Trump that their investigations had found no credible fraud that affected the election.

Top Justice Department officials, including Rosen and Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, joined by White House Counsel Don McGahn, confronted Trump and Clark in the Oval Office and said they would resign if Trump went forward with his devious plan. 

Trump backed off, but continued to pressure state officials in key states to illegally flip the election to him.

BTW, Clark refused to testify before the Jan. 6 committee, invoking 5th Amendment privilege against self-incrimination Ditto Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who tried to get Clark appointed as attorney general. In fact, Perry and several other GOP congressmen tried to get presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.

Now why would you need a presidential pardon? Inquiring minds want to know.

3. Trump pressured Pence to corruptly refuse to count the certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.

Trump was relentless in his hounding of Pence, both publicly and in private. He falsely claimed that Pence could throw out the legitimate electors who voted for Biden and instead accept the fake Trump electors drummed up by GOP lawmakers in several states.

He said publicly that Pence had to do "the right thing" and that if Pence didn't "come through" for him, "I won't like him as much." And privately, he told Pence he would no longer be his friend. (That's a bad thing? And does Trump even have any friends?)

This part of Trump's plan is critically important because in March, federal Judge David Carter, in deciding that Trump ally John Eastman had to release 101 emails to the committee, wrote that Trump "more likely than not" attempted to illegally obstruct Congress as part of a criminal conspiracy when he tried to subvert the 2020 election.

Illegal obstruction. Criminal conspiracy. On the part of a sitting US president. Incredible.

In fact, this appears to be the first time in US history that a federal judge concluded that a president, while in office, apparently committed a crime. Will AG Merrick Garland follow up? We'll see.

4. Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.

Unless you rely on Fox Entertainment for your daily dose of misinformation, we all by now have heard Trump's phone call pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overtake Biden's margin of victory.

5. Trump's legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.

The fake Trump electors that sprung up in seven key states weren't spontaneous reactions by concerned Republicans. They all were part of the same plot, originated and orchestrated by the Trump campaign and executed by Rudy Giuliani and his allies.

According to a CNN investigation, the Trump campaign lined up supporters to fill elector slots, secured meeting rooms in state houses for the fake electors to meet on Dec. 14, 2020, and circulated drafts of fake certificates that were ultimately sent to the National Archives.

It was all choreographed by Giuliani and Trump campaign officials.

6. Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.

Lots of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol and were later arrested and charged told investigators that it was clear to them that Trump was calling them to come to D.C. to stop the electoral count.

One of the triggers was a Trump tweet sent out on Dec. 18, 2020 telling his supporters to come to Washington: "Be there," he instructed them. "Will be Wild!"

Turns out that tweet came after Trump met in the White House late into the night with some of his wild-eyed co-conspirators who apparently got him ginned up about doing more to overturn the election: Michael Flynn, attorney Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others.

This group of poodle moths discussed a number of outrageous ideas, including having the military seize voting machines and potentially rerun elections.

When White House lawyers and other rational staff members found out this barmy band was meeting with Trump, they rushed to intervene and break up the meeting.

But they were too late. Trump supporters, including the fascist Pound Boys and Oathkeepers, took Trump's tweet as a call to arms -- and insurrection.

7. As the violence was underway, Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

The White House and intelligence agencies knew that there was likely to be a violent mob at the Capitol, but they not only were woefully unprepared; they failed to act even as the violence was underway.

As Trump sat sipping Diet Coke and enthusiastically watching the riot unfold on TV from the dining room next to the Oval Office, everyone in his orbit begged him to call off his followers and to order the military to the Capitol. He even got calls from Republicans under siege on Capitol Hill.

He not only refused, he got angry at the constant pleadings. In the aftermath of his deliberate inaction, Cabinet members and White House staffers resigned. There was talk of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office because officials were afraid of what he could do in just the two weeks he had remaining.

Cheney said in her opening remarks:

Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the US government to instruct that the Capitol be defended. He did not call his secretary of Defense on Jan. 6. He did not talk to his attorney general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and deploy law enforcement assets. But Vice President Pence did each of those things.

BTW, if you hear the Fox Entertainment talking point that in the days before Jan. 6, Trump offered to send 20,000 troops to defend the Capitol, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer refused ... please. Consider the source. It's a lie.

First, the number has somehow been doubled (no surprise). Trump himself has claimed he ordered the National Guard to have 10,000 troops ready.

Except he didn't.

The night before the insurrection, Trump met with acting defense secretary Christopher Miller about a matter unrelated to the next day's rally. In the course of their conversation, Trump casually asked Miller, by the way, how many troops are you going to have tomorrow. Miller shrugged and said well, whatever is needed.

Trump, who was convinced that a million of his supporters were going to show up (it was thousands), said half-jokingly, you're going to need 10,000. Miller said, "Maybe," unconvinced. And that was the extent of the conversation.

Trump did not mobilize the National Guard or any other federal agencies, as he had done the previous summer for protests over police brutality.

And Pelosi was not involved in a discussion among then-Capitol police chief Steven Sund, House sergeant-at-arms Paul Irving, and Senate sergeant-at-arms Michael Stenger, who all concluded that they didn't need troops at the Capitol the next day. (Boy were they wrong.)

The upcoming Jan. 6 committee hearings will go into each of these seven plot elements in detail. The next hearings are scheduled for 10 a.m. ET Monday and 10 a.m. ET Wednesday, with future sessions still to be scheduled.

The committee's investigation is ongoing, so there could be more revelations to come.
 

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Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

-- US Representative Liz Cheney

Liz Cheney is one of the most conservative members of Congress. She doesn't support some of the sweeping election law reforms being sought by Democrats. Just the other day, she voted against the House Democrats' gun safety bill, which raises the age at which someone can buy a semiautomatic rifle from 18 to 21, regulates ghost guns and the storage of firearms, and bans high-capacity magazines.

She opposed another bill that would try to stop gasoline price gouging. She thinks Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda is too big. She opposes abortion rights.

But when the account of this period in our history is written, no historian is going to note that Liz Cheney voted against giving restaurants more federal money in April. They will write this: She upheld her oath of office. She chose the Constitution over her political career and put principle before partisanship. She fought for democracy. She met the moment.

I was struck by what Frank Bruni wrote this week for The New York Times:

I keep waiting for Liz Cheney to flinch.

I keep looking for some sign that her nerve is faltering, that the attacks are getting to her and that the loneliness of her situation — unconditionally contemptuous of Donald Trump, emphatically committed to a Republican Party beyond him — has become unbearable.

But no. She’s all in and she’s all steel. It could well be the political death of her. Or it could give her a kind of immortality more meaningful than any office.

When the account of this period in our history is written, the name of conservative Liz Cheney -- shunned by her GOP colleagues, isolated from the new, craven Republican Party, viciously attacked by Trump allies, yet never yielding -- will be engraved in the annals of political courage.

FAST FORWARD