Yuri Gripas/Abaca
Wandrea ArShaye "Shaye" Moss, former Georgia election worker, testifies before the congressional committee investigating the January 6th insurrection on June 21, 2022.
Tuesday’s hearing of the Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack came in two parts: the theater and the news. While the committee is doing a fine job of dramatizing the scope, depth, and details of Donald Trump’s plot to stay in power, the actual news on Tuesday came in the form of an aside and a coming attraction.
The aside was the revelation that on the morning of January 6th, an aide to Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson told an aide to Vice President Mike Pence that Johnson wanted to provide Pence with the slates of pro-Trump/alternative/faux electors from both Michigan and Johnson’s own Wisconsin. Presumably, the idea was to give Pence something to hold in his hands as he rejected the slates of Biden electors that those states had rightly certified, and reinstalled Trump in power.
The real news here, of course, is that this revelation definitely should and perhaps could hurt Johnson, already the one Republican senator who could well lose his seat to a Democrat in November’s election, with some subset of Wisconsin swing voters—particularly the subset that won’t take kindly to Johnson’s attempt to nullify Wisconsin voters’ verdict in the 2020 election, or at least to the precedent that such a move would set.
The coming attraction was the appeal from the committee’s Republican vice chair, Liz Cheney, to Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, to come testify before the committee. This followed some recorded testimony in which an aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows related that Cipollone and others in the counsel’s office had told Trump that his efforts to create uncertified slates of Trump electors in states Joe Biden had carried were patently illegal, particularly after every court had dismissed Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
Noting that Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon had refused the committee’s subpoena to testify, and that John Eastman, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn had shown up only to avoid answering any questions by taking the Fifth, Cheney more or less implied that Cipollone could well end up lumped with those crackpots in the verdict of history if he didn’t appear.
None of the witnesses who actually appeared on Tuesday need fear such a verdict. Rusty Bowers, the Republican Speaker of Arizona’s House of Representatives, and Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, both testified how Trump and Rudy Giuliani had pressured them—in Bowers’s case, to convene the legislature to nullify the state’s vote for Biden, and in Raffensperger’s, to “find” just enough votes to toss the state to Trump. As we already knew, both declined to do Trump’s bidding. Bowers recounted how he continued to press Giuliani for any evidence of voter fraud, with Rudy admitting at one point that he had “theories but no evidence.” Raffensperger testified that the phone call in which Trump alternately threatened and cajoled him to find those 11,000-plus votes had lasted 67 minutes, trotting out one disproven claim after another to somehow bolster his pleading. Any dispassionate observer was compelled to conclude that by dint simply of the length of the call, Raffensperger is underpaid.
Freeman, at the FBI’s suggestion, actually moved out of her home lest she be hurt or killed, and Moss reluctantly resigned her job with the Fulton County election bureau.
Gabriel Sterling, the Republican COO of Raffensperger’s office, recounted the threats and abuse that Trump’s supporters heaped on Georgia’s election workers, and two such workers in one of the Atlanta vote tabulation centers, Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, recounted what they experienced when Trump and Giuliani personally attacked them for their election night processing of ballots, which, Rudy and the Donald alleged, involved hauling in Biden ballots and running them multiple times through the tabulation machines.
The videos taken at their voting center showed nothing of the sort. Moss and Freeman did nothing but their jobs—to which Sterling, Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, and Trump’s U.S. attorney for Northern Georgia, Byung Pak, all testified, also testifying that they’d told Trump or his crew that the president’s claims were, in Barr’s carefully chosen word, “bullshit.” Nonetheless, Moss and Freeman continued to be attacked in talks and tweets from Trump and Giuliani, and were repeatedly threatened by Trump’s minions. Freeman, at the FBI’s suggestion, actually moved out of her home lest she be hurt or killed, and Moss reluctantly resigned her job with the Fulton County election bureau.
As every high-ranking official who’s come before the committee has been a Republican, it should come as no surprise that a number have justified their resistance to Trump’s pressure not only by their duty to uphold the law and the Constitution but also by their religious faith. Arizona Speaker Bowers managed to fuse the two in his testimony Tuesday, saying, “It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is divinely inspired.”
That’s one of those statements that we should take seriously but not literally, lest God be charged with such monstrosities as the Electoral College, not to mention the uncertainty behind both Prohibition (the 18th Amendment) and the repeal of Prohibition (the 21st Amendment). But, hey—if belief in the divinity of the Constitution was one of those things that led Republican officials to reject Trump’s bid to overrule the electorate, who am I to quibble?
