J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo
Vice Chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) speaks as the January 6th Committee holds a hearing on Capitol Hill, October 13, 2022.
From its inception, the House Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol has quite properly not confined itself simply to the mob’s violent crimes on that day, in and around the Capitol. What the committee has done, rather brilliantly, is place those crimes in the context of a larger plot to overturn the result of the presidential election and keep Donald Trump in power, even though he lost. And, to identify Said Trump as Instigator of the Plot.
Through the testimony of as many as 1,000 witnesses—including Trump’s top White House aides, his top campaign officials, his top Justice Department staffers, Republican politicians in swing states whom he urged to fake the numbers, officials in law enforcement agencies, outside aides and hangers-on in Trumpworld, and even some of his children—the committee has made a highly persuasive case that Trump had planned to claim victory months before Election Day, and that he indeed claimed victory on and after Election Day, even though he privately admitted that he knew he’d lost. Not only did he deliberately continue his deception right up to January 6th—indeed, he is continuing it to this very day—but he summoned a violent mob to D.C. and loosed it on the Capitol knowing full well many in that mob were armed to the teeth.
Much of Thursday’s hearing trod over already-covered ground. Some new details, however, strengthened the committee’s case. Detail one was the revelation that, just one week after the election, Trump ordered the Defense Department to withdraw all U.S. forces from Afghanistan and Somalia by January 15th, so he could claim to have ended those interventions before his presidency ended. (The ancillary message the committee was putting out, of course, is that if you think Biden’s Afghan withdrawal was precipitous, you should have seen what Trump ordered—which Defense officials resolutely ignored.)
Detail two came closer to what makes Trump tick than anything the committee has previously revealed. In this case, it was a new snippet of testimony from Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s assistant Cassidy Hutchinson, who was discussing Trump’s rage at the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his case on December 11th—three days before the states confirmed their electoral voters. On that date, Cassidy testified, in the midst of his tirade, Trump walked by Meadows and Cassidy and told them, Hutchinson said, “I don’t want people to know we lost. This is embarrassing.”
Embarrassing. The underlying mission of today’s Republican Party is that to acknowledge Trump’s defeat would embarrass him, and rather than do that, the constitutional order, such as it is, needed to be overturned. When it comes to a choice between the peaceful transfer of power and saving Donald Trump from embarrassment, the onetime party of Lincoln opts for shielding The Donald’s tender ego.
Detail three was a little more from the recorded conversation Trump had with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he implored Raffensperger to “find” just enough votes for Trump to carry that state. “I need 11,000 votes,” Trump said, “give me a break.” There’s the will of the electorate, and there’s Trump’s need for a break—lest, heaven forfend, he be embarrassed.
To acknowledge Trump’s defeat would embarrass him, and rather than do that, the constitutional order needed to be overturned.
Detail four was a host of email and other messages among Secret Service agents and other security agencies, detailing their advance knowledge of just how violent January 6th would be, and that White House officials were privy to these messages. (Fortunately, many of those who brought guns planned to use them only if Trump invoked the Insurrection Act, which, they wrongly believed, would have given them legal sanction to start shooting.)
Detail five came from the testimony of a presidential security agent who recalled how the security detail was “in a state of shock” about Trump’s insistence, as the insurrectionists surged around and into the Capitol, that he go there as well, to lead the mob he’d sent.
Detail six was a previously unheard question-and-answer sequence in which Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone was asked by Rep. Liz Cheney about the many people who urged Trump to tell the mob to leave the Capitol. “Who in the White House,” she asked, “didn’t want those people to leave the Capitol?” Cipollone paused and then said, “I can’t think of anybody on staff who didn’t want them to leave.” Then Cheney asked him whether Trump did, to which Cipollone, as Trump’s lawyer, said he couldn’t answer that.
So everyone on Trump’s staff, not to mention Trump’s kids, Cabinet members, the military, members of Congress from both parties, Fox News hosts et al. pleaded with him to call the mob off. Only Trump thought that was a bad idea.
Of course. Only Trump couldn’t bear the embarrassment of losing, and as there was no one else who could summon the violence that might spare him the humiliation of losing, he was sticking to his—or his mob’s—guns. I alone can fix the election, he must have thought.
The committee concluded today’s hearing by voting to subpoena the former president, thereby upsetting both Trump (who surely will refuse to appear) and Attorney General Merrick Garland, who now must decide whether to prosecute Trump for blowing off the subpoena. Worse yet, Garland must decide before the next Congress, which has a 69 percent chance of being Republican according to FiveThirtyEight, convenes in January and abolishes the committee, rendering the subpoena moot.
To descend into the crassly political (that’s in my job description), should Garland decide to prosecute before the midterms, he might drive more Trump fanatics to the polls. Then again, he might drive more Trump critics to the polls, too.
Poor Merrick. If only the state of American democracy didn’t depend on his executing the law.
