Lights, camera….
Donald Trump’s insurrection was an assault on democracy that has not abated. Televised hearings on the Jan. 6 investigation begin tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern. House committee members hope it will be “a really big shoo” (an expression too old for many of those who rioted).
Trump and Republican acolytes in Congress built up unrealistic expectations among the MAGA faithful that the 2020 election results would be overturned on Jan. 6, 2021. Rep. Debbie Lesko (R-Ariz.) said in a recording from Jan. 5, “And when that doesn’t happen — most likely will not happen — they are going to go nuts.”
One did not have to be a seer to predict that. The rest of us should better manage our expectations for these hearings.
The panel sets out to show that the attack on the Capitol was not simply a Trump rally that ran amok, writes Stephen Collinson (CNN), “but was the culmination of weeks of chicanery to subvert a free election by a President who called a crowd to Washington and incited an uprising against the American experiment itself.”
The committee has assembled evidence that efforts to subvert the election took place from the nation’s capitol to state capitols. The committee, Collinson writes,
… has sought to establish, for example, the level of planning of the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and whether there were direct links between the ex-President’s circle and partisan groups like the Proud Boys. Some leaders of the far-right extremist organization were this week charged by the Justice Department with seditious conspiracy in a bid to fracture the democratic transfer of power. Thursday’s hearing will feature testimony of two people who interacted with the group in early 2021.
It is unlikely that the televised hearings will change minds among those who went “nuts” that day. Everyday crises occupy most people’s minds. If they even hear any of the evidence presented. Republicans and Fox News mean to black-out or distract from as much of the hearings as possible.
CNN legal analyst Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor, said the committee needs to drive a simple message concentrating on Trump’s role but also encompassing the totality of the broader plot.
She said the hearings should focus on “not just January 6, (but) the misinformation campaign, the frivolous lawsuits, the fake electors scheme, the pressure on Mike Pence, the pressure on state legislators and state election officials, the planning of the January 6 rally, the involvement of congressional members … all leading to the insurrection.”
“They need to repeat, repeat, repeat: ‘This was the Trump coup.'”
Those old enough to remember may recall that the Watergate hearings were not “a really big shoo” at the start. But by the time former Nixon White House counsel John Dean described a “cancer growing on the Presidency” on live television it had become one.
Former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone is in negotiations with the committee to provide public testimony. ABC notes:
Cipollone was one of the few aides who was with then-President Donald Trump in the West Wing on Jan. 6. ABC News previously reported that in the days following the attack on the Capitol, he advised Trump that Trump could potentially face civil liability in connection with his role encouraging supporters to march on the Capitol.
Let’s hope Trump is sweating golf balls.
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