He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.
House investigators will debut their first public hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection in prime time on Thursday, June 9 at 8 p.m. Eastern. Stand by for what the Party of Trump and their liege lord will do to distract public attention (NBC News):
“The committee will present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings, and provide the American people a summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” the panel said.
There will be visuals, surely. And a guest star, TBA. This is TV.
Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and his committee will be competing for eyeballs with infotainment.
CNN reported Thursday on a few among the flood of text messages received by then-chief of staff Mark Meadows as Donald Trump’s MAGA mob battled police defending the Capitol:
“He’s got to condem (sic) this shit. Asap,” Donald Trump Jr. texted at 2:53 p.m.
“POTUS needs to calm this shit down,” GOP Rep. Jeff Duncan of South Carolina wrote at 3:04 p.m.
“TELL THEM TO GO HOME !!!” former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus messaged at 3:09 p.m.
These urgent texts and more poured in while Donald J. Trump watched the battle on TV at the White House and did nothing. Rioters attacked the Capitol just after 1 p.m. Trump delayed issuing a statement calling off his supporters until 4:17 p.m. By then, several people were dead or dying.
One of the key questions the January 6 House committee is expected to raise in its June hearings is why Trump failed to publicly condemn the attack for hours, and whether that failure is proof of “dereliction of duty” and evidence that Trump tried to obstruct Congress’ certification of the election.
The Meadows texts show that even those closest to the former President believed he had the power to stop the violence in real time.
[…]
Seventeen months later, CNN spoke to more than a dozen people who had texted Meadows that day, including former White House officials, Republican members of Congress and political veterans. Without exception, each said they stood by their texts and that they believed Trump had the power and responsibility to try to stop the attack immediately.
Most who spoke with CNN would do so only anonymously.
Some said it was because of their jobs. Some said they were afraid Trump would be reelected. One said they just didn’t want to go through “the misery of being targeted by Trump supporters.”
The committee hopes to tell the Jan. 6 story, Axios reports, “in such a way that the American people understand the gravity of what happened — and the role former President Trump and his associates played in ginning up the mob that tried to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”
They will try. They’d best have hired media advisers.
Former congressman Denver Riggleman (R-Va.) told CNN’s Anderson Cooper this week he used his intelligence background and an analysis team he assembled to help the committee match anonymous phone numbers in collected texts to names and locations. The language from sitting and former members of Congress and connected Trump donors was so “horrific” and disconnected from reality that it scared him. It was “spiritual warfare coupled with QAnon-type of religiosity and types of conspircay theories” coming from people in high positions of power.
The committee’s goal will be to lay out a coherent narrative from incoherent ravings.
I’m not confident they can reach a lot of Americans living on Earth II.
Brynn Tannehill, a technical analyst with RAND tweeted this week:
I have a friend, whose husband is a retired Marine special forces guy. He spent better part of a year at the siege of Khe Sanh. After he retired, he was a police officer (SWAT) and medical first responder. He’s vaguely conservative on some things, but not nuts. 1/n
In his retirement, he still teaches police, SWAT teams, and first responders about dealing with ugly mass casualty events, including Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and High Yield Explosives. He’s still part of the state volunteer emergency services. 2/n
This past week, he got asked to do a day of training for emergency medical services providers in a different county. Think even redder and more Trumpy than his already fairly conservative home town in a red state. 3/n
Part of his training (the briefing with PowerPoint) was discussing where mass casualty attacks come from, who does them, their tactics technics and procedures, and what sorts of injuries their mass casualty events produce. Basically, here’s what to expect. 4/n
For anyone who’s military, this should sound pretty boring and normal: it’s the intel briefing that everyone gets when discussing CONOPS.
Except, this crowd of “students” was having none of it.
Why? 5/n
Because this decorated combat vet who’s pro-police in in most cases had the temerity to show them the FBI statistics on the sources of domestic terrorism and mass casualty events: which is roughly 75% right wing, 18% religious, 4% left wing, and the rest other or N/A. 6/n
Under right wing he included things like neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and the like.
The audience refused to believe.
“No! It’s Antifa!”
He pulled up the spreadsheets and stats on the FBI website.
They still wouldn’t believe him, even with FBI data collected un Trump. 7/n
Best of luck, Bennie. You’re going to need it.
(h/t JH)
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