Today's Hearing: Trump's Central Role In Coup

The seventh hearing by the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Trumpist insurrection starts today at 1 p.m. EDT, with the focus of the hearing on the roles of the Malignant Loser's "team crazy" and the far-right extremist militias that mobilized to stage a coup. The Nation's John Nichols previews:

"...it will provide details about the former president’s participation in a December 18, 2020, White House meeting with what committee member Jamie Raskin has described as a 'group of lawyers, of outside lawyers who have been denominated "Team Crazy" by people in and around the White House.' At the meeting, which involved Sydney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Flynn, among others, Trump’s most extreme associates plotted to overturn the will of the people. They discussed moves that are often associated with coups, such as the seizure of voting machines from states where Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

Then, said Raskin, Donald Trump confirmed his role as 'the central figure who set everything into motion,' with a tweet that called his supporters to Washington for what would become the January 6 insurrection."

That tweet was the infamous one that promised January 6 "be there, will be wild." Rep. Raskin (D-MD) will lay out a timeline of the Malignant Loser's unhinged behavior, after losing 65 frivolous court cases, after failing to coerce state officials to overturn the election, and after the Electoral College confirmed his loss to Biden:

"The timeline that Raskin described draws a clear line from Trump’s rage at his defeat to his determination to reverse it.

That’s critical to the trajectory of the hearings, which have already exceeded expectations when it comes to revealing Trump’s failure to respond to the deadly coup attempt as it was underway on January 6. Now, 'Trump’s treason' in the days and weeks prior to the attack on the US Capitol will be highlighted with what should be sufficient detail to damn him in the eyes of all but the most delusional Americans."

The fact that these hearings have fallen on the deaf ears of his rabid cult isn't important. A historical record of the 45th President's seditious and violent acts will have been made for posterity, and near-term for the prosecutors and courts to act on.

(photo: Trump exhorting his armed crowd to go to the Capitol. AP)

 

How Being Targeted By Trump Changed Two Lives

 

Here are brief clips of testimony at this afternoon's January 6 insurrection hearing from mother/ daughter Fulton County, GA, election workers Ruby Freeman and "Shaye" Moss on the effect of being singled out by the Malignant Loser and Rudy Giuliani with vile lies and defamatory comments about their roles in counting ballots:

  

All this damage -- to our institutions, our democracy, and to everyday people -- because a sociopathic narcissist's ego was so fragile that he was unable to admit he lost a damn election. Sick sick sick.

January 6 Insurrection Hearings Resume Today

At 10 a.m. EDT, the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 insurrection will have its second hearing.  Here's some of what to expect:

The second public hearing by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection will focus on then-President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was stolen — dubbed the “big lie” — and how those false claims were connected to the pro-Trump mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol that day in a bid to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s electoral college win, lawmakers on the bipartisan panel said Sunday.

In a background briefing with reporters on Sunday night, a select committee aide said the hearing on Monday, led by Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) with an assist from Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), will also dissect the fundraising apparatus that was built around the “big lie” to drive up the post-election cash haul.

“We will reveal information about how the former president’s political apparatus used these lies about fraud, about a stolen election, to drive fundraising, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars between Election Day 2020 and January 6,” a committee aide said.

“And we’ll show that some of those individuals responsible for the violence on the 6th echoed back to those very same lies that the president peddled in the run-up to the insurrection,” the aide added. [snip]

Testifying on Monday before the committee will be former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien; Chris Stirewalt, a former political editor for Fox News; Benjamin Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer; former U.S. attorney B.J. “BJay” Pak; and Al Schmidt, a former city commissioner of Philadelphia.

The witnesses are likely to bolster the committee’s assertion that Trump had a “seven-part plan” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, as Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the committee’s vice chair, said Thursday.

The third hearing, on Wednesday, will cover the Malignant Loser's attempts to pressure the Department of Justice to overturn the election results by giving credence to the Big Lie that there was rampant fraud.

The remaining hearings are tentatively scheduled as follows:

Hearing 4 is intended to outline Trump’s efforts to pressure VP Mike Pence to stop the electoral count. There is some indication this hearing will take place Thursday, June 16. Greg Jacob, the former chief counsel to the vice president will reportedly testify.

Hearing 5, June 21 will trace the then-president’s alleged efforts to unduly influence state legislators and election officials. Brad Raffensperger, secretary of state of Georgia and Gabriel Sterling, one his top aides, have been subpoenaed to testify.

Hearings 6 & 7 are meant to detail how “Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them, illegally, to march on the U.S. Capitol” and how he failed to act to stop those same people as they invaded the Capitol building. No date is yet set for these proceedings.

Members of the committee are indicating in various forums that the hearings will essentially prosecute the case that the Malignant Loser committed multiple federal crimes, including the most obvious and serious: conspiracy to commit sedition (18 USC § 2384).

ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, and MSNBC will provide live coverage (the LA Times is reporting that Fox "News" will also cover the daytime hearing, unlike its blackout of last Thursday's evening hearing).

(Photo illustration:  Salon/Getty Images)

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)

QOTD -- No Righteous Conclusion?

 

"Not everything was good about the media world of the 1970s. It was almost entirely White and male, barely open to other views or voices. This was long before the democratizing effect of the Internet, which has elevated the ideas of people of color, women and other marginalized groups.

"But it was a time when we had a news media that commanded the trust of the general public, a necessity in helping bring Nixon to justice. That, at least during his presidency, was never possible with Trump.

"As we remember Watergate, we ought to remember how very unlikely its righteous conclusion would be today.

"Richard M. Nixon’s presidency would have survived." -- Margaret Sullivan in the Washington Post, on why the upcoming January 6 hearings on the Capitol insurrection will not have the same impact as the Watergate hearings, due to a radically altered media environment that is more fractured and less trusted.  Many observers have pointed out the fact that Fox "News" was the first national Republican propaganda organ that was created to make sure another Republican president's righteous defenestration wouldn't occur again;  many others have followed on multiple platforms that were not even conceived of in the 1970's.  It's why the Malignant Loser survived an unprecedented two impeachments, and may survive a righteous conclusion for conspiring in and leading the first coup attempt in American history.