Jonathan Ernst/Pool via AP
From left, Benjamin Ginsberg, Washington attorney and elections lawyer, BJay Pak, former U.S. attorney in Atlanta, and Al Schmidt, former city commissioner of Philadelphia, are sworn in to testify as the House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its second public hearing, June 13, 2022, on Capitol Hill.
Today, Congress’s January 6th Committee spent a good portion of the morning asking essentially the same question that Howard Baker, the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee, first posed 49 years ago: What did the president know and when did he know it?
In Watergate, getting the answer to Baker’s query required the discovery, the court-ordered release, and the subsequent playing of the Nixon tapes for Congress, and the American people. During its current investigation, the January 6th Committee got the answer from a host of top government officials and Trump campaign leaders, who all testified that they’d told Donald Trump repeatedly, emphatically, and on occasion profanely that he’d lost the election to Joe Biden, and that his protestations that the election had been rigged and subjected to voter fraud and tampering were nonsense.
Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, detailed in videotaped testimony that all the allegations he’d had U.S. attorneys and the FBI investigate had turned up no evidence of rigging, fraud, or miscounting. Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien testified, again on video, that he’d told Trump many times before the election that the mail vote, which likely would favor the Democrats, would come in late, and that this was normal procedure, not evidence of tampering or theft. He testified that he’d told Trump many times after the election that he’d lost. The chief attorneys for Trump’s campaign testified that they’d told Trump he’d lost. Jeffrey Rosen, who succeeded Bill Barr for a brief stint as attorney general, told Trump that he’d lost. Trump’s appointee as U.S. attorney for Northern Georgia (which includes Atlanta) testified that he’d investigated a video that Rudy Giuliani said showed Atlanta vote-counters taking ballots from a mysterious suitcase, though the video clearly showed that the suitcase was actually an official ballot box.
The Republican Party’s longtime chief election attorney, Ben Ginsberg, who’d represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore, testified that none of the cases that Trump’s legal team (that is, Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and the deranged crew that Trump hired after he’d fired his campaign team for telling him the truth) brought before 62 courts had any credible evidence to back them up, which is why the judges dismissed half of them at the outset, and the other half upon examination of the unsubstantiated “evidence” on which they were based. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), the committee member who skillfully handled the questioning today, then noted, 22 of the judges before whom those cases were brought were appointed by Republican presidents; ten were appointed by Trump himself.
Lofgren quoted the opinion of one of those judges, who characterized these suits as “a coup in search of a legal theory.”
Interspersed with witness testimony, the committee showed footage of Trump debunking the election in the periods immediately following the meetings at which he’d been told he hadn’t won. (It also showed footage from months before the election in which Trump had told followers that the only way he’d lose would be through voter fraud.) On election night, Stepien testified that he’d told Trump he should say that the count was ongoing, and everyone should wait until it was done. Instead, he noted, an obviously drunk Rudy Giuliani urged Trump to claim victory, and, of course, that’s just what Trump did. It also became clear from Stepien’s and others’ testimony that they’d tried to keep Rudy from the vicinity of Trump’s ear—and failed.
On the one hand, today’s revelations were devastating to Trump and his wholly fictitious account of the 2020 election results. On the other hand, Trump’s entry to the national political scene came when he alleged that Barack Obama had actually been born in Kenya, despite all evidence to the contrary. He was next seen alleging that thousands of New Jersey Muslims had celebrated the 9/11 attacks, when, again, there was no shred of evidence behind his claim. When has Trump not been detached from reality, save when he can spin reality to his advantage?
The Big Lie is the product of one man’s narcissistic psychosis. The deeper question is why it has afflicted the majority of House Republicans who voted to overturn the electoral vote certifications on January 6th? How did Trump’s narcissistic psychosis come to afflict them, even though most of them had relied on legal authorities like Barr and campaign managers like Stepien throughout their careers, and are likely to do so in the future? How did it come to afflict senators like Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, who now and then succumb to empiricism? As with Trump, is there anything that these Republicans can be relied upon to tell the truth about?
Trump has built his entire career on deception, but despite his demagogic skills, even he has needed an echo chamber for those lies to be fully propagated. For that, he’s been reliant on right-wing media, most particularly the Murdoch empire, which by now could teach Joseph Goebbels a thing or two about how to spread the Big Lie.
Today’s witnesses related Trump’s various responses to their truth-telling, which ran the gamut from rage to monologues to a whack-a-mole mode in which he acknowledged that one far-fetched allegation might be wrong, only to offer multiple others. Eventually, though, the price of truth-telling was invariably the same: Either Trump fired you, or you beat him to the punch by resigning.
Donald doesn’t kill the messenger, he just cans them. Though, as one Republican election commissioner from Philadelphia testified today, Donald’s followers have certainly threatened to kill truth-tellers and their families.
As the January 6th hearings roll on, one clear difference between Trump and Nixon is emerging. “What did the president know and when did he know it?” was a key question about Watergate. With Trump, however, his knowledge of truth has always been subordinated to his indifference to truth.
Not that there isn’t some precedent for that, courtesy of the Gospel of John as set down by Francis Bacon: “‘What is truth?’ said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.”
