15 October 22
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This was the chilling conclusion of Liz Cheney today at the January 6 hearings over what would have happened if the guardrails of our democracy, exposed for their frailty in 2020, had buckled to an autocrat determined to hold onto power. And the danger remains. “Without accountability, it all becomes normal, and it will recur,” Cheney warned.
Cheney’s statement is striking in its simplicity and its power. Her audience is her “fellow citizens,” the ones who will be going to the polls in less than a month to decide who should lead this nation going forward. Her fellow Republicans have cast Cheney as a pariah for having the courage to state the truth: that their leader wanted to destroy America as we know it.
What the committee presented today shed a spotlight on the authorship of this historic tragedy. It is Trump who is the playwright, conjuring and casting the roles of those who would act out his destructive intentions. It was he who dreamt up and directed a frontal attack on American democracy. But he couldn’t have done it without his willing accomplices.
Today, we saw footage of members of Congress grappling in real time with a deteriorating situation on January 6 that could have ended with more bloodshed and the decimation of governmental order. We could feel a visceral fear in their actions and words, not only for their own personal safety but for the safety of the nation they had sworn an oath to serve. Those who could have intervened, starting with the president but including his top aides inside the White House, were absent. And that is just as the president wanted it. We heard today evidence that Trump knew he had lost, and he didn’t care what it would take to retain power.
This man who shamelessly pounds his chest with protestations of patriotism, who literally wraps himself in the American flag, who demonizes his political opponents as haters of America is really the one who views our imperfect experiment in self-governance with disgust. Elections. The rule of law. Peaceful transfers of power. The will of the people. These are the pillars of our nation’s foundation. But for Trump, that’s all just for suckers. He had the presidency, and he didn’t plan on relinquishing it, no matter what the voters or the Constitution said.
January 6 wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a rally that spun out of control. It was a dangerous and violent storm threatening our nation’s core principles and our whole system of representative democracy. Stop and ponder that. Then remember that it should have been no surprise. The committee has made clear that the plan had been on the radar for weeks. There was plenty of evidence in advance that Trump and his cronies were planning to disregard the verdict of the election if it went against him.
But details and evidence uncovered since have been stunning, including documentary footage of longtime Trump loyalist Roger Stone played today. Here is what Stone had to say even before Election Day (excuse the language, please): “I say fuck the voting, let’s get right to the violence.” Was what we saw on January 6 a Plan B, or really a Plan A?
One of the great attributes of this committee is expert storytelling, laying out, with gripping detail, a narrative — a true story — about the attempted destruction of our democratic order. They have carefully traced the origins of this horror to before the election. They have shown the rising danger and threats of violence. They have identified villainy, led by the president. They have explained with breathtaking intimacy what took place on January 6. And they have made very clear that that day’s actions, while dramatic, were not a denouement. How this story ends is currently unknowable. We will have a better sense after the midterm elections and with the Department of Justice’s decision if, how, and whom to prosecute.
There is a lot about what we heard today, and in the previous hearings, that is infuriating. It also is hard not to feel a deep sadness about the precariousness of our democracy. But we can find hope in the service of this committee. They are saying to all of us, “This happened. Let us not let it happen again. And let us hold those responsible, accountable.”
They believe that most Americans cherish our self-governance, our stability, and our rule of law. They believe that if we know the truth, that we will do everything in our power, as a people, as a nation, to protect against its recurrence.
Does that belief still hold? Or are we now so divided that we can no longer be sure? This is the overriding question as our beloved America evolves in the first quarter of the 21st century.
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Demonstrators scuffle with riot police, during a protest following the death of Mahsa Amini. (photo: Reuters)
Thousands of worshipers had gathered on Sept. 30 in the Great Mosalla of Zahedan, a large open-air space in the southeastern Iranian city, when a handful of young men broke away and began chanting slogans at a nearby police station. One man, 28, said his 18-year-old brother was among them. He spoke to The Washington Post on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
The young man followed his brother, pushing his way through the crowd, and stumbled on a shocking scene: Police and plainclothes security agents were firing at the protesters from the rooftop of the police station and other buildings. Security forces also began firing into the Mosalla, where people were still praying.
“They were shooting a lot, and this way and that way, I saw people get shot and fall,” the young man said in a telephone interview from Zahedan. “Many people were shot, and they were crawling on the ground toward buses or other cars to hide behind them. I just wanted to find my brother and get out.”
What happened that day — already known in Iran as “Bloody Friday” — is by far the deadliest government crackdown against protesters since demonstrations began sweeping the country nearly a month ago. Internet service has been cut or severely disrupted in the region over the past two weeks, along with the cellular network, making it difficult to piece together how the violence unfolded. The Post interviewed two witnesses to the Sept. 30 crackdown, including the young man, who described security forces using deadly and indiscriminate force against peaceful demonstrators.
The Post could not independently confirm their accounts, but their stories were corroborated by local activists and lined up with the findings of rights groups.
The Friday protest in Zahedan had been announced on social media earlier that week, in solidarity with the uprising that has gripped the nation since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in the custody of the “morality police” on Sept. 16. But the protesters, many of them ethnic Baluch — a minority group that lives mostly in southeast Iran and across the border in Pakistan — had local motivations as well.
They were infuriated by reports that a 15-year-old girl had been raped in police custody in the city of Chabahar in early September. This Baluch girl was their Amini, another young woman who they believed had been abused by state security forces. The crowd that day was chanting “Death to the dictator” and “The rapist must be punished” when security forces opened fire.
The 28-year-old man frantically dialed his brother’s phone and eventually found him behind a white Peugeot. They ducked down and made their way out of the area, positioning themselves between a line of cars and a border wall of the Mosalla. The brothers had run only a short distance when they saw a mutual friend, whom they beckoned to escape with them. Then gunshots rang out again.
“[Our friend] was shot twice in the back, only two or three meters away from me,” the young man said in an exhausted voice. “One of the bullets hit near his heart. He was martyred right there.”
“From the evidence we’ve gathered, what happened at Mosalla was a massacre,” said Mansoureh Mills, an Iran researcher at Amnesty International, which has counted at least 66 people killed that afternoon. Other human rights groups put the death toll even higher.
“The killing of children and people who were praying … I can’t see how it could be called anything else,” Mills said.
The Iranian government ramped up its use of force against protesters after an order issued by the country’s highest military body on Sept. 21 to “severely confront troublemakers and anti-revolutionaries,” according to a leaked document obtained by Amnesty and reviewed by The Post.
The security forces appear to be enforcing this broad order with an even heavier hand in ethnic-minority areas such as Baluchistan, as well as Kurdistan in western Iran, where Amini was from and where the protests started.
The Baluch, like the Kurds, have long been neglected by the Iranian government. The area where most of them live, Sistan and Baluchistan province, is among the poorest in the country. The Baluch and the Kurds are also predominantly Sunni communities in a country ruled by a theocratic Shiite government.
The state’s response in these areas “has been particularly brutal,” said Ali Vaez, Iran project director for the International Crisis Group. He warned that the government crackdown “was further exacerbating the risk of continued turmoil.”
After the initial shooting around the police station, security forces also fired on crowds gathered around the Makki Mosque, a short distance from the Mosalla. Bullets riddled the front of the mosque and tear-gas canisters were fired into the prayer space, activists said, including the women’s section, where mothers were sheltering with their children.
By this time, the young man and his brother had gathered a group of protesters to carry their friend’s body to the Makki Mosque. A helicopter circled overhead, the young man told The Post, and gunmen inside periodically fired into the crowd. They were “shooting from above, and we had to go inside the mosque,” the man recalled.
Many of the dead and wounded had been taken into the mosque by midafternoon; protesters threw rocks at security forces to keep them away, witnesses said. So many people were wounded that there was a shortage of blood at local hospitals, activists reported.
A 60-year-old man who lives in the Shirabad neighborhood in north Zahedan received news that his 25-year-old son had been fatally shot, and that his body was at the mosque. The man made his way there with great difficulty, asking others to help carry his son’s body home.
“When we wanted to take my son’s body out, two people were shot in front of me right at the door of the Makki Mosque. One was shot in the head and the other was shot in the chest,” the father said in a telephone interview from Zahedan, sharing his story on the condition of anonymity. “We waited until sunset before we could leave.”
State media announced that three members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were also killed that day. Among them was Col. Hamid Reza Hashemi, a deputy intelligence commander for the Guard Corps in Sistan and Baluchistan, according to the semiofficial Tasnim News Agency.
The government has sought to blame the violence on Jaish al-Adl, a local militant group, but the group has denied any role in the protests, and the activists and witnesses interviewed by The Post say they did not see any armed protesters in the crowd. In a statement the day after the attacks, the commander of the Guard Corps, Gen. Hossein Salami, vowed revenge for the security personnel who had been killed.
“Salami’s statement is a threat against the people,” said Abdollah Aref, director of the Baluch Activists Campaign, an advocacy group based in Britain. “What they’re saying is if you come out into the street, then we’ll shoot you and kill you.”
The young man and his brother made it home safely that Friday, but violence followed them. As protests continued in their neighborhood over the next several days, security forces responded with deadly force.
“They would wear local Baluchi clothes so they wouldn’t be recognized and people wouldn’t think they’re linked to the government,” the man said. “They would come in civilian cars and civilian clothes, shoot people, and leave.”
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Donald Trump. (photo: Erin Schaff/NYT/Redux)
So now that the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol has voted — unanimously — to subpoena him, you have to wonder about the former president's next move.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, a member of the House select committee, told NPR on Friday that Trump doesn't really have a choice.
"Multiple presidents and seven former presidents have come to testify before Congress, several of them voluntarily," he said. "His being a former president does not entitle him to skip out on the law."
Aziz Huq is a professor of law at the University of Chicago, where he focuses on constitutional law, and he joined All Things Considered to parse what comes next.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Interview highlights
On whether Trump can ignore the subpoena
A subpoena is a lawful order to produce either documents or to testify. But a subpoena needs to be enforced. Congress has to take a couple of steps before this subpoena would be enforced, and it is likely that any of the paths that it took would require a good deal of time and would give the former president a number of opportunities to delay the process beyond the life span, at least, of the current Congress.
On what penalties he may face if he does not cooperate
The committee has two basic options. The first is that it could refer the case to the Justice Department for prosecution. There is an 1857 statute that allows prosecutions for contempt of Congress. Indeed, Steve Bannon was just convicted under that statute.
The second option the committee has is to proceed in court itself using a civil suit to compel performance by the former president under the subpoena's terms. If the committee takes that second route, there's a possibility of civil contempt sanctions, which might be a fine and, in rare cases, imprisonment.
If they take the criminal contempt route, and the Justice Department were to agree to bring a case, and a court were to find the former president in contempt, that could be a sentence of up to one year and a fine of up to $1,000.
On what would happen to the Jan. 6 committee if Republicans win the House in the upcoming election
If the Republicans gain control of the House in November, the new majority would have power both to wind up the Jan. 6 committee and also to withdraw the subpoena against the former president. In that case, the former president would not have any legal concern with respect to producing information for a committee that no longer existed.
On what the point of the subpoena is from a legal standpoint
Obviously, the committee is making a point about the former president's involvement in the Jan. 6 events. It's making a point about the alleged criminality of the former president's alleged involvement.
It's not completely impossible that you would see some kind of a legal consequence from this. The way that I would imagine that playing out is the committee deciding after the November election to bring a criminal referral to the Justice Department, and the Justice Department proceeding with that criminal referral against the former president even after the House has changed hands.
I think that that course of action would present a number of quite unprecedented legal questions about, for example, whether a subpoena could be pursued with criminal contempt charges after the subpoena itself has been withdrawn. But it, at least, is imaginable given the current political landscape.
On whether the issue raises concerns on the separation of power
This kind of dispute is unusual in that it immediately draws in all three branches of government. There's immediately a question of whether the legislature should go to the courts, whether the attorney general has to bring a prosecution. Once the Congress has indicated it wishes him to do so, and there's a question of whether executive privilege or some other executive branch entitlement prevents either the court acting or the legislature acting. So, absolutely, there are separation-of-power issues at stake. Perhaps what makes this story distinctive is the complexity and the entanglement of those issues because of the involvement of all three branches.
On whether there is a mechanism to hold such a high-level figure accountable
I certainly think it is possible to imagine a Congress creating an appropriately nonpartisan mechanism for investigating and pursuing sanctions or accountability for high-level criminality within the executive branch. We've tried to do that on a couple of previous occasions, and at least now doing so would run up against interpretations of the Constitution that have been adopted by the Supreme Court in the last decade or so. So I do think that it's possible to imagine an effective scheme for high-level accountability. The problem today, however, is interpretations of the Constitution by the U.S. Supreme Court that would preclude those measures from being put into place.
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