Cipollone’s testimony upended that last hearing
If the last hearing seemed a bit disjointed with half the hearing about the crazy meeting with the Kraken lady, the QAnon General and the Overstock guy and the rest devoted to the extremists, it’s because the late Cipollone testimony had to be added at the last minute so they left out some of the extremist stuff:
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol scrambled to add new testimony from White House counsel Pat Cipollone to its latest hearing on Tuesday, and in the process bumped aside evidence about former President Trump’s ties to violent extremist groups.
Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) acknowledged the shift on Wednesday, saying the panel wanted to highlight testimony from a hard-won witness after Cipollone sat down for a formal deposition on Friday under subpoena. Left on the cutting room floor was evidence tying some of Trump’s closest allies to some of the prominent right-wing groups on the front lines of the Capitol insurrection.
“It was in the original script, but we pulled some back just because of the timing,” Thompson said in response to a question from The Hill about ties between Trump World and groups like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.
“The Cipollone deposition was important. And obviously, it’s just a choice we had to make.”
Cipollone delivered a damaging assessment of Trump’s final weeks in office, confirming that he and other legal advisers had determined Trump had lost the election, exhausted his avenues to contest the result and should have conceded defeat instead of pressing his vice president, Mike Pence, to block the electoral count.
But the last-minute adjustment to feature Cipollone came at a cost, leaving unexplored some of the very ties the committee had previously revealed — and promised to explore in greater depth — between Trump and the extremists.
Left unmentioned, for instance, was a Jan. 5 request from Trump to have chief of staff Mark Meadows contact two informal advisors, Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, who both used extremist groups as security details.
The panel also excluded any mention of the so-called war room at the Willard Hotel near the White House, where leading Trump allies — including his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — had huddled to devise strategy ahead of Jan. 6. At least one member of an extremist group, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, was reportedly among them.
Yet the extremist groups played a relatively minor role in Tuesday’s hearing, when the panel leaned on Cipollone’s fresh testimony to demonstrate a broader idea: that Trump drove the effort to overturn the election in defiance of his own White House counsel.
To advance that idea, the select committee cobbled together seemingly disparate themes: an “unhinged” meeting at the White House; secretive plans to make Trump’s call to march to the Capitol appear unexpected; and analysis of a tweet that mobilized extremist groups to show up armed in Washington on Jan. 6.
But the undercurrent was the committee’s push to show Trump’s willing engagement each step of the way, even as they fell short of expectations that they might establish a more direct link between the White House and violent extremists. Some outside legal experts noticed the void.
“I think the committee advanced the ball in terms of providing some new information, but it’s very clear that there are gaps in what their investigation has found with regard to potential conspiracy or Trump’s direct links to the militia groups and other extremists,” said Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at the New York University School of Law.
I don’t know why they couldn’t have gone on a bit longer. I think we could handle it. But apparently they are planning for more hearings going into the fall so maybe they’ll fill in that gap. It’s also possible that they think/know that the DOJ is coming at that through their January 6th seditious conspiracy cases. Either way, I hope the government doesn’t completely drop the ball on that one. Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Steve Bannon and others in that group were on the horn with Trump in the days leading up to the 6th and they were in contact with the violent extremists. They can’t just drop that ball.