Did Donald Trump plot coup strategy with his generals at the Willard hotel headquarters on January 6th? Was there any discussion of possible violence? The Guardian reports that the January 6th Committee thinks he may have:
Congressman Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, has said the panel will open an inquiry into Donald Trump’s phone call seeking to stop Joe Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January hours before the insurrection.
The chairman said the select committee intended to scrutinize the phone call – revealed last month by the Guardian – should they prevail in their legal effort to obtain Trump White House records over the former president’s objections of executive privilege.
Thompson said the select committee could not ask the National Archives for records about specific calls, but noted “if we say we want all White House calls made on January 5 and 6, if he made it on a White House phone, then obviously we would look at it there.”
The Guardian reported last month that Trump, according to multiple sources, called lieutenants based at the Willard hotel in Washington DC from the White House in the late hours of 5 January and sought ways to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January.
Trump first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term, the sources said.
But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, the sources said, on at least one call, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January in a scheme to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.The former president’s remarks came as part of wider discussions he had with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification, the sources said.
House investigators in recent months have pursued an initial investigation into Trump’s contacts with lieutenants at the Willard, issuing a flurry of subpoenas compelling documents and testimony to crucial witnesses, including Bannon and Eastman.
But Thompson said that the select committee would now also investigate both the contents of Trump’s phone calls to the Willard and the White House’s potential involvement, in a move certain to intensify the pressure on the former president’s inner circle.
I always come back to this passage from the Woodward and Costa book “Peril” and the January 5th exchange between Trump and Pence in which Trump, listening to the crowd outside the White House cheering for him, told Pence that he wanted him to let the House of Representatives decide the election. Pence responded that he didn’t have the authority and Trump gestured to the crowd outside the window and said to him, “Well, what if these people say you do?” As we know, Pence refused, but according to the book Trump later commented to others that there was a lot of anger “out there” and we all know what he said the next morning to his ecstatic and worshipful crowd.
Marcy Wheeler has some interesting ideas about how this may play out. She thinks Roger Stone may be the weak link — the same Roger Stone with very close connections to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
I don’t know what it all means, but if they are seriously contemplating a criminal referral to the DOJ for obstruction of congress by Trump this could be a key.
Again, I’m not getting too overheated about any of this. After all, Trump got away with multiple counts of obstruction of justice in the Russian probe, some so egregious they would make Richard Nixon blush — and we all watched it happen in real time. When he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and not lose any votes I believed it. I didn’t realize at the time that he could shoot someone of 5th Avenue and not get prosecuted but I’m afraid that’s true too.