Last Night's Insurrection Hearing

 

 

We're scrambling a little this morning, so we picked a couple of observers' thoughts on last night's riveting hearing on the January 6 insurrection, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY).

Takeaways

• Cheney revealed Trump had “a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.” She said during the upcoming hearings, “you will see evidence of each element of this plan.”

• Cheney said that future hearings would feature testimony from Trump Cabinet members “discussing the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment and replacing the president of the United States.”

• Cheney also revealed new details about the White House’s response to the riot, including a video clip of the deposition given by Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Milley told House investigators that it was then-Vice President Mike Pence who gave the order to send National Guard troops to respond to the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, but that the White House instructed him to say that Trump made the call.

• In one of the most highly anticipated moments of the hearing, the committee showed a clip of its interview with Trump’s daughter and former White House adviser, Ivanka, in which she said she accepted her father’s defeat in the 2020 election. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said.

• Cheney said the committee has obtained evidence that, in the wake of Jan. 6, “multiple” Republican members of Congress, including Rep. Scott Perry, R-Pa., pursued pardons from the outgoing president.

• It was revealed that in the weeks before Jan. 6, Trump met with Gen. Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and others at the White House “alone for a period of time before White House lawyers and other staff discovered the group was there and rushed to intervene.” According to Cheney, after this meeting was when Trump tweeted to his supporters of Jan. 6: “Be there, will be wild!”

Did the Committee pull it off?

Throughout June, the committee has to weave together thousands of hours of testimony, tens of thousands of documents, more than 1,000 different people they interviewed — and make it all coherent, compelling and as concise as Congress can be. In their first prime time hearings, they did that expertly.

Over a period of two hours on Thursday (relatively short, for a congressional hearing), the committee aired snippets of about a dozen pretaped interviews, ranging from Trump’s former attorney general to his son-in-law Jared Kushner (who said he thought the White House counsel’s threats to resign over the election fraud push was “whining”) and his daughter Ivanka Trump (testifying that she accepted the Justice Department’s assessment that the election wasn’t stolen), from Trump campaign officials to attackers who are now serving jail time for breaching the Capitol.

They also showed the public new footage of the attack, splicing images of determined rioters yelling obscenities and waving Trump flags as they marched, with body-camera footage from panicked Capitol Hill police officers.

And in between all of that were two live witnesses: Quested and Capitol Hill police officer Caroline Edwards, who was one of the first attacked and who returned to the line of duty repeatedly.

We were skeptical going in that the audience's attention could be held over the two hours allotted (which they adhered to perfectly).  Granted, we're not the average viewer, but we would say that they put forth a prosecutor's expert opening argument that the jury (us) felt increasingly drawn into.  Kudos to Rep. Cheney, who calmly went through the evidence of criminal culpability that the Committee will expand on in future hearings, dropping a couple of teases concerning revelations to come. She also fired a verbal shot at her spineless colleagues, saying, 

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

Next hearing:  Monday, June 13, at 10a.m. EDT.  We'll be there.

BONUS:

 

The January 6 committee presents a pre-produced, previously unseen video showing the day of Jan. 6, 2021 in chronological order, starting in the morning before the Capitol was breached. Watch the full video here: https://t.co/zJGbTzYCeY

— CNN (@CNN) June 10, 2022

 

(Photo: Doug Mills, New York Times)