Liz Cheney for the prosecution
“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said Thursday during the first of six planned televised hearings by House Jan. 6 investigators. “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Cheney made clear that after the riot, several Republicans asked then-President Donald Trump for pardons. Cheney named Rep. Scott Perry of California who has refused to cooperate in the investigation.
“Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election,” Cheney added. Those others will be bracing for their names to be revealed.
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) called the hearing to order and advised his audience that Jan. 6 was “the culmination of an attempted coup” by Pres. Donald Trump, a “last stand — his most desperate chance to halt the transfer of power.” He’d lost the 2020 election. Video testimony to come would show he knew it, yet continued to spread the lie that the election had been stolen.
“He lost in the courts, just as he did at the ballot box. And in this country, that’s the end of the line,” Thompson said. “But for Donald Trump, that was only the beginning of what became a sprawling, multi-step conspiracy aimed at overturning the presidential election.”
Trump himself was at the center of the plot.
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said.
Two story lines emerged during thw two-hour, prime time hearing. One of duty, sacrifice, and honor as U.S. Capitol and D.C. police tried to fend off a violent mob of Trump supporters led by the Proud Boys. Some of the injured officers, their spouses, and widows watched more harrowing hand-to-hand combat footage, mostly from body cameras, than we had seen before.
Dana Milbank writes (Washington Post):
The other was a tale of brutality and deceit by Trump and a small band of loyalists. They knew he had lost, and yet, as Cheney put it, “Trump oversaw and coordinated a sophisticated, seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.”
In perhaps the most chilling moment of the hearing, Cheney spoke of former White House officials’ testimony about Trump’s bloodthirstiness toward his own vice president. “Aware of the rioters’ chants to hang Mike Pence, the president responded with this sentiment, quote, ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea.’ Mike Pence, quote, ‘deserves it.’ ”
Cheney presented a prosecutor’s opening argument with deliberateness and precision. For posterity. She has all but ended her political career in the Republican Party by participating in this investigation of Trump and his attempted coup. She means her exit to leave a bruising mark.
After playing a tape of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner dismissing White House counsel Pat Cipollone’s warning of potential violence as “whining,” Cheney addressed the oath to protect and defend the Constitution taken by members of Congress and the executive branch.
“We don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party,” she said, pointedly, for her Republican colleagues. “We take our oath to defend the United States Constitution, and that oath must mean something.”
A timestamped, 10-minute video demostrated that the Jan. 6 insurrection was not simply a rally that got out of hand. Hundreds of Proud Boys were approaching the Capitol perimeter a half hour before Trump began his speech. Before he finished, the mob led by the Proud Boy vanguard had already breached barriers on the Capitol grounds.
In dramatic live testimony, Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards told the panel she had been knocked unconscious when the mob egged on by Proud Boy Joseph Biggs breached bike rack barriers at the edge of the Capitol gounds. Recovering herself, she rushed to rejoin the reforming police line, describing it as “an absolute war zone” like “something out of the movies.”
“There were officers on the ground. You know, they were bleeding. They were throwing up. You know, they had, I mean, I saw friends with blood all over their faces. I was slipping in people’s blood. I was catching people as they fell.”
“It was carnage,” she continued. “It was chaos. I can’t even describe what I saw, never in my wildest dreams did I think as a police officer, as a law enforcement officer, I would find myself in the middle of a battle.”
In laying out what some of the remaining hearings will reveal, the committee made clear it was laying groundwork for criminal cases by the Justice Department. We will have to wait for closing arguments.
Mens Rea
Perhaps the most damning piece of Jan. 6 conspiracy evidence Thursday night was not presented by the House January 6th Commmittee. Fox News had made clear it would not carry the House hearing along with other major networks. But in a desparate attempt to keep its audience from seeing any of the prime time presentation of evidence, Fox News ran its shows for two hours commercial free during the hearing.
“It didn’t simply cover other things,” writes Philip Bump, “it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.”
Tucker Carlson’s hour ended with guest Darren Beattie, former Rep. Matt Gaetz staffer and former Trump speech writer. He was fired from the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad after attending a white nationalist conference. Beattie alleged that the Jan. 6 attack as a false-flag operation by the federal government.
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