54 search results for "Luttig"

Prominent conservative lawyers went to the trouble of examining in detail at all the lawsuits that were filed in 2020 to see if there was any truth to the assertions that there was massive voter fraud. Guess what?

It was obvious, of course. But it’s important that these conservatives did this work because Republicans all over the country are pretending that there was massive fraud in order to restrict voting going forward and give themselves an advantage. These attempts are going to end up in court and this sort of evidence will be important:

A group of conservatives, including prominent lawyers and retired federal judges, issued a 72-page report on Thursday categorically rebutting each of the claims made in court by former President Donald Trump and his supporters over the 2020 election results.

The report, “LOST, NOT STOLEN: The Conservative Case that Trump Lost and Biden Won the 2020 Presidential Election,” looked at more than 60 court cases Trump and his supporters filed and lost in six key battleground states. It reached the “unequivocal” conclusion that the former Republican president’s claims were unsupportable — which Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security as well as election officials nationwide debunked days after the 2020 election.

The report was released as the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol has been holding public hearings that have connected Trump’s involvement in efforts to overturn the 2020 election to the attack that disrupted Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory. Trump is considering an early 2024 presidential run announcement, CNN has previously reported.

“There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct,” the report says.

The report is signed by retired federal appeals court judges Thomas B. Griffith, J. Michael Luttig and Michael W. McConnell, former Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, former US Sens. John Danforth and Gordon H. Smith, longtime Republican election lawyer Benjamin L. Ginsberg and veteran Republican congressional chief of staff David Hoppe. Several of them are longtime Trump critics.

“Even now, twenty months after the election, a period in which Trump’s supporters have been energetically scouring every nook and cranny for proof that the election was stolen, they come up empty. Claims are made, trumpeted in sympathetic media, and accepted as truthful by many patriotic Americans. But on objective examination they have fallen short, every time,” the report says.

The report warns that it’s “wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

It delved into a detailed examination of each case brought by Trump and his supporters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Trump and his backers alleged fraud, irregularities and procedural deficiencies in their challenges in court.

Trump and his allies lost nearly all the more than 60 cases they brought challenging the 2020 election results, the report noted. Twenty were dismissed before a hearing on the merits, 14 were dropped by Trump and his supporters, and 30 included a hearing on the merits, it found.

The group of conservatives argued that Trump and his supporters had “an obligation to recognize that the election debate was over.”

“Questions of election legality must be resolved dispassionately in courts of law, not through rallies and demonstrations—and most emphatically, not by applying political pressure and threats to induce Congress to ignore its constitutional duty and the electoral outcome for which the people voted, and which the legal processes of the affected states had examined and confirmed,” the report says.

We know that he was planning to do this if he lost the election regardless of the facts at hand. He could have lost by a million votes in every state and he still would have done it. But for the few people left on the GOP side who are still in touch with reality, some of whom may be in the judiciary, these facts may have some persuasive power.

Will John Eastman get the last laugh?

The 2021-2022 Supreme Court term will go down in infamy.

The right-wing majority behaved as if they were kids in a candy store, stuffing their faces with all their favorite goodies knowing there was no one who could stop them and no one who could hold them accountable for having done it. On gun rights, abortion, religion and the environment they took a wrecking ball to the court’s precedents and created bold new tests out of thin air. It was a breath-taking exercise of sheer institutional power — and they’re just getting started.

On the last day of the term, after handing down yet another shocking ruling (hamstringing the government’s ability to deal with climate change), they announced that they plan to take up one of the most hare-brained, right-wing assaults on democracy yet this fall — Moore vs Harper. Surprising even their most cynical critics, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the so-called “Independent State Legislature Doctrine,” a half-baked idea that sprang out of nowhere in the opinion written by Chief Justice William Rehnquist and signed by Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas in Bush v. Gore. Rehnquist held that since Article II of the Constitution says that states are to appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” a federal court can reverse a state court’s decision regarding state election law if it finds that that the state court disregarded the intent of the state legislature. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a scathing dissent in response, accusing the opinion of displaying “an unstated lack of confidence in the impartiality and capacity of the state judges who would make the critical decisions if the vote count were to proceed.” He said it would “only lend credence to the most cynical appraisal of the work of judges throughout the land.”

Rehnquist’s novel idea was pretty much relegated to the ash heap of history except for some far-right judicial gadflies who were apparently chattering about it a Federalist Society cocktail parties for the past couple of decades. Until it reared its ugly head again before the 2020 election when Republicans started litigating their complaints about changes to the voting system due to the pandemic.

In a Wisconsin “shadow docket” case that was vacated by the full court, Justice Brett Kavanaugh weirdly inserted an irrelevant footnote referencing Rehnquist’s idea saying that “the text of the Constitution requires federal courts to ensure that state courts do not rewrite state election laws.” A few days later Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas filed a statement in a case in Pennsylvania suggesting that they also believe the Court must reverse a state supreme court that “squarely alters” election law enacted by a state legislature. So that makes four justices who have at least hinted that they are sympathetic to the idea that they are empowered to overrule state courts if they follow their own state constitutions in voting rights and procedures. In fact, it appears that all four are willing to overrule all state actors in favor of the legislature which they deem to be the only authority over election laws. Well, except, of course, for the Supreme Court which reserves for itself the final word.

What this means in practice is that Moore could potentially put an end to state laws designed to end partisan gerrymandering, including in places like California where they use independent commissions. Even more concerning, closely divided states in which the legislatures are dominated by Republicans with Democratic governors and Democratic majorities on the Supreme Court, could end up being totally at the mercy of state legislatures which could act with total impunity. Governors could not even exercise their normal veto power and the courts would be nothing but potted plants when it comes to elections. With partisan gerrymandering untouchable, those Republican majorities would pretty much be permanent.

J. Michael Luttig, an ultra-conservative former jurist, highly respected among Federalist Society types like the Supreme Court majority, sounded the alarm months ago, calling the Republican attempts to overturn the election in 2020 a “dry run for 2024.” He specifically mentions the Supreme Court’s apparent interest in the Independent State Legislature Doctrine and his analysis of the probable outcome in Moore tracks with other court observers: The three liberals will reject it along with Chief Justice John Roberts while Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas and Kavanaugh are all onboard. Only Amy Coney Barrett’s vote is unknown and she’s firmly an “originalist” which this court uses as a catch-all rationale for whatever partisan outcome they desire.

Luttig made plain what needs to be done:

Trump and the Republicans can only be stopped from stealing the 2024 election at this point if the Supreme Court rejects the independent state legislature doctrine (thus allowing state court enforcement of state constitutional limitations on legislatively enacted election rules and elector appointments) and Congress amends the Electoral Count Act to constrain Congress’ own power to reject state electoral votes and decide the presidency.

It’s possible they’ll be able to do the latter but after what we’ve seen this term it will be a shock if the court does not let loose the hounds of hell on our electoral system by empowering far right, super-gerrymandered legislatures to create election “rules” in federal elections that could conceivably overturn the vote of the majority. That is, after all, what Trump and his legal henchmen were pressuring state officials to do in 2020. Is there any question that they will do it in the future once they have the imprimatur of the Supreme Court?

As a political institution, the Republican Party no longer has any commitment to basic democratic principles. And from what we saw this term, it’s clear that as a legal institution the Supreme Court is no longer committed to them either. This case could literally spell the end of democracy as we’ve known it. ‘

Salon

Are Troubles are coming?

“Remarkable moment,” observes Plum Line’s Greg Sargent:

@JoeNBC flatly states that “fascism” is rising in the GOP, and that Republicans must condemn the Eric Greitens “RINO hunting” ad, or it will get worse.

'This is fascism. This is using violence and violent imagery to basically tell people to vote for me, a civil war is coming. It’s where the Republican Party is right now. Every Republican needs to call this out…' @joenbc on Missouri Senate GOP candidate's campaign ad pic.twitter.com/QRJDBHFWIl

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 21, 2022

“Scholars of democratic breakdown agree that what GOP leaders do now is critical,” Sargent tweets, referencing a column written last week after retired judge J. Michael Luttig’s “foreboding” testimony before the Jan. 6 investigating committee on Thursday. Donald Trump and his allies pose a “clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig warned:

Two of those experts, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, professors of government and politics, recently argued that we’re heading into a “coming age of instability.” This is not a claim of pending “civil war.” It’s more subtle: a future of smoldering conflict akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland.

“Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections,” they wrote, predicting our elections might devolve into periodic referendums on whether the United States will be “democratic or authoritarian.”

This portends “heightened political violence,” they suggested, including assassinations, bombings and violent confrontations in the streets, “often tolerated and even incited by politicians.”

How GOP leaders respond to the moment will help determine whether that happens, the scholars noted. It bodes badly that GOP leaders rejected a bipartisan Jan. 6 accounting and have “refused to unambiguously reject violence.”

A strong stance against violence by party leaders “would make all the difference in the world” to what happens next, Levitsky said.

Luttig concurred. If they don’t, we are headed for “protracted democratic instability.”

“Here’s what troubles me,” tweets Sargent. “It’s easy to get seduced by these vivid, damning revelations” in the Jan. 6 hearings. “But in the background, even as headlines explode around the country, scores of pro-coup GOP candidacies continue.”

And they are “packing.”

Trumpists think intimidation and threats of violence work for them. Appearing in ads holding weapons is a tribal signifier on the right. A mark of manliness, virility. When Republican candidates start posing barechested like Benito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, brace yourselves.

The best Donald Trump can do is tweet photoshops.

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This post by Heather Cox Richardson on Luttig’s testimony is excellent:

On Thursday, Judge Luttig examined the ongoing danger to democracy and located it not just on former president Donald Trump and his enablers, but on the entire Republican Party of today, the party that embraces the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, the party that continues to plan to overturn any election in which voters choose a Democrat.

“[T]he former president and his party are today a clear and present danger for American democracy,” Luttig reiterated to NPR’s All Things Considered.

I’ve been thinking a lot since Thursday of Luttig’s clear-eyed view of the dangers we face in this country today, and of his willingness to cast aside old political loyalties to call them out in order to protect our democracy. They remind me of nothing so much as Abraham Lincoln’s description of the way northerners reacted to the 1854 passage of a law permitting the spread of enslavement into western lands from which it had previously been excluded. The passage of that law woke up Americans who had not been paying attention, and convinced them to work across old political lines to stop oligarchs from destroying democracy. Northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver” to push back against the oligarchic enslavers, Lincoln later said. Regardless of where they started politically, they stood up for democracy together. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”

Over the course of the next decade, that new coalition argued and struggled and took the nation in an entirely new direction. It fought and won a war that involved more than two million men and cost more than $5 billion, established our first national money, welcomed immigrants, created public colleges, invented the income tax, gave farmers land, built transcontinental railroads, and—finally—ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for a crime for which a person had been duly convicted.

And, of course, it saved the nation from those seeking to destroy it.

“[T]o my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of politics,” Luttig told NPR about his extraordinary statements. In a later note he added: “I wanted to do this for America and I understood I had an obligation to do it for America. It was my ‘moment’ in my life to stand up, step forward, and bear witness to what I believe and what I do not believe.”

Here are highlights of Luttig’s interview on NPR:

Do you think that there is a meaningful constituency within your party, the Republican Party that is, willing to have good-faith conversations about this? And if so where are they?

As of the day that I testified, no, there are none, and there haven’t been for these couple of years. I’m not a politician, I don’t do politics, but that’s what I propose happen. And it’s with my fervent hope that some number of our elected leaders, at least, will hear the words that I spoke on Thursday and understand what I said, which is that they have an obligation, a high obligation, that they undertake by oath to act in the interest of America and Americans in contrast to their own personal political interests.

If you look at the most recent primaries, pro-Trump candidates are still competing across the country and winning on the lie that there was election fraud in 2020. How do you build trust in our democracy, in the idea that we can get to a better place in our country when you have people at these important high levels who are denying the 2020 election results?

You don’t and you can’t, and that’s why I testified Thursday that the former president and his party are today a clear and present danger for American democracy. And I specifically contrasted that with the circumstance, had it been so, that the former president and the Republican Party had stood down after the 2020 election and accepted the results. But as I said to the select committee on Thursday, that’s not what’s happened.

To this day, the former president and the Republican Party have insisted — and they persist in the claim — that the 2020 election was stolen, and not merely that, but they pledge to execute the same blueprint in 2024 that they attempted in 2020. But their every intention is if they do execute on that plan in 2024 that they will win in 2024 where they failed in 2020.

The January 6th hearings are clearly important for the country to understand what happened on that day and why it happened, and I know you feel that way, but many Republicans do not. They call the hearings an effort to divide. And so I wonder whether you think that they’re more likely to bring closure or further fuel this division that you say is destroying our democracy?

Well, when I turned in my statement to discussing the two political parties in the United States, the most important words to me … were that the two political parties in America are the political guardians of our democracy. That’s why I went on to say that it’s imperative that both parties end this one war for democracy and suggesting that it was the obligation of the Republican Party to begin that reconciliation.

We cannot have in America either political party behaving itself like the Republican Party has since the 2020 election. As long as that continues then we will have an unstable democratic order in the United States, and we will forever be fighting over American democracy. As I went on to say in my statement, the war for America’s democracy is not a war that America can win.

If the two political parties are going to be fighting literally over America’s democracy, that is a war that is endless, and it is destructive of the United States of America. And there is not a person in this country who can disagree with that. They can argue over you know whether, as the Republicans have continued to do, the 2020 activities of the former president in the party threatened democracy. They’re silly to even suggest that. But they cannot argue over the abstract point, the conceptual point that I made, which is if the two parties cannot agree to the orderly transfer of power in the United States then that war will continue, and as long as it continues we do not have democracy in the United States.

Do you think that the January 6th hearings that are going on right now might actually sort of break through and encourage politicians to maybe start to stand up on this issue?

Well, you know I’m a former judge and a lawyer, and to my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of politics. So count me as cynical as to politics and all politicians. Do I think that maybe these hearings can break through to some American patriots who are currently our political leaders? I hope with all my heart and soul that the hearings will break through to those political leaders.

You can listen to the whole thing here:

It isn’t working for them

Greg Sargent on the Luttig testimony:

At the close of Thursday’s Jan. 6 select committee hearing, J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge widely respected by conservatives, issued a long-term warning. Trump and his allies pose a “clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said, who pledge to “succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”

“The former president and his allies,” Luttig continued, “are executing that blueprint for 2024 in open and plain view of the American public.”

This might seem like a narrow procedural prediction: If 2024 is super-close, they’ll attempt the same manipulation of our creaky electoral college machinery as last time. They might succeed. They’re putting those pieces in place right now.

That’s all true. But Luttig’s testimony, along with the shocking new revelations, point to something more fundamental at stake. These hearings are about what kind of long-term democratic future lies ahead: They represent an effort to minimize the possibility that we’re sliding headlong into a protracted era of chronic instability and rising political violence.

If you doubt this, please note: The foreboding expressed by Luttig and others is shared by experts who study democratic breakdown. When Luttig says we’re at a “perilous crossroads,” and says only Republicans can “bring an end” to the threat, he’s not alone.

Two of those experts, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, professors of government and politics, recently argued that we’re heading into a “coming age of instability.” This is not a claim of pending “civil war.” It’s more subtle: a future of smoldering conflict akin to “the Troubles” in Ireland.

“Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections,” they wrote, predicting our elections might devolve into periodic referendums on whether the United States will be “democratic or authoritarian.”

This portends “heightened political violence,” they suggested, including assassinations, bombings and violent confrontations in the streets, “often tolerated and even incited by politicians.”

How GOP leaders respond to the moment will help determine whether that happens, the scholars noted. It bodes badly that GOP leaders rejected a bipartisan Jan. 6 accounting and have “refused to unambiguously reject violence.”

Whether those scholars are right remains to be seen. But the most recent developments are not encouraging.

We’re now learning that Trump and his co-conspirators corruptly pressured many government actors to steal an election he knew he lost. That he knew the scheme was illegal. That he weaponized a mob to chase his vice president through the Capitol, resulting in horrifying political violence, destruction and death.

It’s easy to get seduced by the vivid, damning nature of these revelations. Now that they’re exploding in our faces, surely some sort of accountability awaits the coup plotters. Surely Republican elites will quietly reckon with the truth about Jan. 6 and renounce Trump as fundamentally unacceptable in a party leader, even if they don’t say so loudly.

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— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) June 17, 2022

Look at those headlines. Big changes must be coming, right?

Maybe. But in the background, scores and scores of GOP candidates across the country remain fully committed to the notion that the underlying mission of the coup plotters and Jan. 6 rioters was just. The revelations haven’t slowed their campaigns in the slightest.

The Jan. 6 committee will release a damning report this fall, and maybe we’ll see prosecutions. But here’s another possibility: No one is prosecuted, Republicans take Congress, Jan. 6 headlines fade, and after the noise dies down, many pro-coup Republicans are in positions of control over election machinery — and Trump or a designated successor is a favorite for the 2024 GOP nomination.

How many GOP leaders are calling on those candidates to renounce this permanent posture holding that future election losses will be subject to nullification? How many GOP leaders are condemning what we’re learning about Trump’s coup attempt?

It is precisely this fact, that few GOP leaders see a need to reorient the party away from these tendencies, that alarms experts in democratic breakdown. So I contacted Levitsky, one of the above article’s co-authors, to ask whether a forceful stand by GOP leaders against what we’re now learning might help alter the trajectory he fears.

“It would make all the difference in the world,” Levitsky told me. As he defined the problem, the GOP is highly competitive in national elections while simultaneously being “captured by authoritarian forces.”

If GOP leaders treated the Jan. 6 committee’s findings as revelatory and significant, Levitsky continued, it might steer us toward greater stability. This would prompt “institutional reform,” he said, and send a message to all levels of the party that “this is beyond the pale. We don’t do this in America.”

The alternative: GOP leaders don’t treat this as beyond the pale at all, but instead as containing the makings of a tolerable or even desirable future. This would impose a “great cost,” Levitsky said, because “many Americans will be left with a message of ambiguity.”

I contacted Luttig to ask: How important is it for GOP elites to renounce the pro-coup candidates in their midst, and flatly declare the new Trump revelations disqualifying in a party leader and 2024 nominee?

If they don’t, Luttig told me, he agrees America may be headed for a period of “protracted democratic instability.”

Alternative futures are possible. Democrats might rebound and win decisively in 2024. Or maybe Trump will retire to Mar-a-Lago, Republicans will cleanly win in 2024, and President Ron DeSantis will turn out to be more authoritarian bark than bite.

But one thing seems unavoidable: If GOP leaders were to treat these revelations with the urgency and seriousness they deserve, it would probably render the darker alternative a lot less likely.

Republicans benefit from what Trump did — and is doing. They know Trump is a liability. But if he can succeed in getting the election machinery in the country manipulated in their favor, he’s worth it to them. They are all in it together.

“One of our two parties is … following the rules of authoritarianism”

A column from Tuesday presaged retired Judge J. Michael Luttig’s Thursday testimony that “Donald Trump and his allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian at New York University who authored “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” spoke with Business Insider:

“The authoritarian playbook has no chapter on failure,” Ben-Ghiat wrote in a November 2020 piece for The Washington Post. “Nothing prepares the ruler to see his propaganda ignored and his charismatic hold weaken until his own people turn against him.”

When, two months later, former President Donald Trump urged his supporters to head over to the US Capitol in a last-ditch effort to overturn the 2020 election, Ben-Ghiat was not altogether surprised. Indeed, she had told people to expect it, arguing: “the rage that will grow in Trump as reality sinks in may make for a rocky transition to Biden’s presidency. Americans would do well to be prepared.”

Had Trump actually arrived outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 as he promised the mob he sent there, things may have been far worse. It is a mistake to see this operation as “amateur.”

One thing that is haunting me, a lot, is if you put the pieces together, which is what these hearings are allowing us to do, is when the temporary Senate president, Chuck Grassley, on January 5th, tweeted that he would be doing the Electoral College count, not Pence, because Pence won’t be with us that day. 

That’s one of these things that got attention and then it kind of went out of the news cycle. Chuck Grassley is third in command. If we think in terms of this being a coup attempt, these are very important details. He was third in command and one of the people above him was Nancy Pelosi. And we just saw, once again, we were reminded that the violent mob that breached the capital was looking for Nancy Pelosi. So if we think of January 6th in the frame of a coup attempt, and coup attempts are violent, this could have had a very different outcome that really resembled something out of a political thriller or a coup attempt that we read about in other countries.

With that in mind, one question the Jan. 6 committee needs to ask is what did Sen. Chuck Grassley know in advance about the coup plot? Why did he send that tweet?

Like Luttig, Ben-Giat sees warning signs she’d rather not see:

 I am absolutely haunted by the fact that people were trying to kill Pence and that Trump said that he deserved to hang. This kind of party, authoritarian discipline, where you follow the leader or you deserve to die, that’s not democracy. That has nothing to do with democracy. So the challenge in the coming time will be that one of our two parties is really exited from democracy and right now it’s following the rules of authoritarianism. I don’t know where this is gonna take us, but it’s not a very good place for a country to be.

If Trump gets prosecuted (successfully), says Ben-Ghiat (and as Luttig emphasized on Thursday), the danger is not over:

When people are prosecuted for corruption or whatever the charge is, and it sticks, that personality cult — it starts to deflate, it starts to shrivel. It’s happened in several countries around the world, only when they are prosecuted. So that’s an argument for doing that.

Now, if that does happen to Trump — DeSantis has already absorbed all the lessons of Trump. He’s clearly readying himself for a national run, whether it’s in 2024 or later. And he’s a very dangerous individual. I’ve written several essays on him already. He’s dangerous because he is equally repressive, but doesn’t have the baggage of Trump. It’s hard to have the baggage of Trump. Trump has a criminal past, in so many areas, that nobody else is really like Trump I would say. All of those things could happen.

Watch for these tee shirts to pop up among DeSantis supporters if he runs and Trump does not.

This is the future that Joey Gibson, Proud Boys, & fascist scum want: the torture, executions, & institutionalized terror of the Pinochet regime. Never mind the centrists, the time to fight these Far Right nightmares is now!! Defend yourself, defend your communities! #DefendPDX pic.twitter.com/HcdXorl6t2

— New York City Antifa (@NYCAntifa) August 4, 2018

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Trump’s GOP has no allegiance to the rule of law

“Trump was told the plan to block the election was illegal but tried it anyway, and the lawyer who suggested it asked for a pardon after the riot.” That headline from CNN’s landing page neatly summarized Thursday’s third hearing of the House Jan. 6 investigating committee.*

Coup architect John Eastman knew that the two options he was recommending to then-president Donald Trump— for Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the electoral votes of several states and unilaterally declare Trump the victor, or to send the slates of electors back to several states for reevaluation — violated several provisions of the Electoral Count Act yet recommended them anyway. He considered the act unconstitutional, testified Greg Jacob, the top White House lawyer to former Vice President Mike Pence.

That view would likely lose in court, Jacob argued. Eastman replied that the [Supreme] court would not get involved in such a political dispute, clearing the way for the Trump team to violate the Act with impunity. Asked if he ever admitted in front of then President Trump that his plan would violate the Electoral Count Act, Jacob testified that Eastman did so on January 4, two days before the attack on the Capitol.

In later further testimony, Jacob said Eastman believed, best case, he would lose in the Supreme Court seven to two before conceding it would likely by nine to zero. Who did Eastman think were the two?

Trump went ahead with his pressure campaign against Pence. When on Jan. 6 Pence did not comply, Trump issued a tweet that incensed the angry mob and put Pence’s and others’ lives at risk. Rioters read the tweet aloud and vowed revenge.

A confidential informant told the FBI that had the Proud Boys captured Pence they would have killed him, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) told the hearing.

Eastman was so dogged in his pursuit of his plan to keep Donald Trump in office past Jan. 20, 2021 that he called White House attorney Eric Herschmann the day after the riot to pursue it further. Herschmann thought hes was out of his mind and advised, “Get a great f’ing criminal defense lawyer. You’re gonna need it.”

Thursday’s testimony verified the soundness of that advice.

Subsequent to the failed coup, Eastman emailed Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to ask that he be placed on a list of Trump pardons. He never received one. In testimony before committee investigators, Eastman invoked his 5th Amendment rights one hundred times.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked a key quesation that Thursday’s testimony did not answer directly.

Cannot emphasize enough: you don’t just get long meetings in the the White House with the most powerful people on earth! This is all wildly aberrant and deranged.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) June 16, 2022

“Constitutional mischief,” Judge J. Michael Luttig said of the theory that Pence could reject the electoral vote count in the 2020 election. The respected conservative jurist (retired) testified at the start of the hearing and more pointedly at the end.

“Donald Trump and his allies are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” Luttig said. “To this very day, the former president, his allies and supporters, pledge that in the presidential election of 2024, if the former president or his anointed successor … were to lose that election, that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way that they attempted to overturn the 2020 election.”

Also Thursday, a court filing in the criminal case against Proud Boys Joseph Biggs and Dominic Pezzola revealed that the Department of Justice sent a letter to the committee on June 15 requesting transcripts of all its witness interviews. The materials are “potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations” and “likely relevant to relevent to specific prosecutions” underway. The materials are important for defense lawyers as well.

Future hearings will explore Trump’s actions during the riot itself. With any luck, Eastman is not the only White House insider who will need “a great f’ing criminal defense lawyer.”

* Press critic Dan Froomkin found a few others infuriatingly lame as well as a few ledes.

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And it has many tentacles all over the country

Judge Luttig’s statement this morning and his final comment at the hearing made it clear that the coup is ongoing. Here’s some data to back that up:

One consequence of former President Donald Trump’s “Big Lie,” or the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, is that many states have changed voting laws in their states, making it harder to cast a ballot. In total, we found in our analysis of data from the Brennan Center for Justice, the Voting Rights Lab, the National Conference of State Legislatures and FiveThirtyEight’s own database that since the 2020 election, 24 states have passed 56 new laws that restrict voting, in some cases affecting nearly every step of the process.

You will notice that a few of the battleground states run by Republicans are especially hard at it, especially Arizona and Georgia. We know there are others getting ready to take the “independent legislature doctrine” out for a spin as well. All those Trump cultists running for office around the country will certainly make sure that Republicans have the advantage in 2024.

Republicans won’t be in the room thank God

The long-awaited January 6th committee public hearings have finally been scheduled. The first one is set for next Thursday, June 9th, in prime time. The committee previewed their plans for next week, announcing on Thursday that they 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.” They seem to be very carefully choreographing the event, even drawing out the suspense by not naming the witnesses until next week.

The hearings, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, will “tell a story that will blow the roof off the House.” We can only hope that is not unjustified hyperbole. These hearings are an important public record of an attempted coup that the whole country must see.

What we have already seen is quite a bit of information, like the voluminous text messages from various Republicans and journalists to the White House Chief of staff Mark Meadows during the insurrection itself. There have been leaked testimonies from major players inside the Department of Justice and Donald Trump’s White House, as well as information from Trump’s legal advisers and various state officials. Between all of that and the media’s own digging, people who have been following the story have a pretty clear picture of what happened.

Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn a legal election with a series of plots that culminated in the violent insurrection on January 6th. But no one has put together the whole story for the American people so that they can understand just how unprecedented and dangerous these schemes were — and how close we came to a very serious constitutional crisis.

The committee is promising previously unseen material and one hopes it will add something to the narrative that we haven’t yet seen. And it seems that they are serious about putting together a professional, multi-media presentation, so it shouldn’t be too boring for the public. But the most important element of these hearings is going to be witness testimony. It will be the first time we’ve heard from anyone involved, or even any experts, on the subject of the coup in an official capacity. (You may recall that in Trump’s second impeachment, the Democrats were going to call witnesses but backed down at the last minute. )

Expert testimony is always important in hearings like this to educate the public about complex issues. Axios reported this week that they plan to call conservative Republican former federal judge, J. Michael Luttig, a man who was shortlisted more than once for a Supreme Court seat. Luttig advised Former Vice President Mike Pence on the illegality of overthrowing the government. (Evidently, Pence wasn’t sure …) 

Republicans are obviously worried that some of their troops might tune in and see something that will shake their faith in the Big Lie.

He wrote in a CNN op-ed in April that Trump lost the election fair and square and that all the rules the Republicans are screaming were unlawfully changed were actually changed “to expand the right and opportunity to vote, largely in response to the COVID pandemic.” He is right and the majority of Americans know that. But Luttig went much further in his analysis of the situation and it’s something the greater public needs to understand:

Trump’s and the Republicans’ far more ambitious objective is to execute successfully in 2024 the very same plan they failed in executing in 2020 and to overturn the 2024 election if Trump or his anointed successor loses again in the next quadrennial contest. The last presidential election was a dry run for the next.

Luttig is ultra-conservative. But he isn’t delusional and he isn’t a coward which makes him something of a unicorn in Republican circles. His testimony should be very compelling.

CNN reported that the committee has also called members of former Vice President Pence’s inner circle, including his chief counsel Greg Jacob  and his chief of staff Marc Short. In addition they are expected to call former Justice Department officials who were pressured by the president and his lackeys to lie about the election being stolen as well as what CNN calls other “first hand witnesses.”

We won’t be hearing from Trump himself or the witnesses who are refusing to cooperate, some of whom, like Steve Bannon and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, have been referred to the Department of Justice for contempt of congress. Meadows is perhaps the most important accomplice of the bunch since he seems to have been the clearing house for every half-baked conspiracy theory in the right-wing fever swamp during the post-election period. He originally cooperated with the committee and turned over a boatload of documents and text messages before he decided to clam up. The texts are scintillating reading, exposing the fact that virtually the entire GOP was begging Trump to stop the insurrection for hours, proving they believed he had the power to do so.

And apparently, as former GOP congressman and January 6th Committee investigator Denver Riggleman told Anderson Cooper, the text messages during the post election period prior to that day were downright chilling:

Riggleman calls Meadows the “MVP” for all the information he provided and one of his close aides, Cassidy Hutchinson, was subpoenaed and testified several times before the committee and appears to have shared other vitally important information. No one has announced that she will testify publicly but if she does, it’s clear she has a story to tell.

Whatever happens in these hearings we can be sure that they will be different than any hearings you may have watched in recent years and it’s not just because of the extraordinary subject matter. For the first time in recent memory, we will have a congressional hearing without even one obnoxious Republican grand stander seeking to derail the whole thing. We can expect that this committee will be serious and focused which is something we have not seen in public hearings for a very long time.

The Republicans are obviously worried that some of their troops might tune in and see something that will shake their faith in the Big Lie so they are plotting to “counter-program” the hearings. Axios reported on Thursday that they are deploying everyone from House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy to possibly Trump himself to fan out to Fox News, Steve Bannon’s “War Room,” “Real America’s Voice,” Facebook and Trump’s own Truth Social to ensure the base doesn’t lose their religion.

They plan to portray the Democrats as out of touch with average Americans, one aide telling Axios, “we’ve got to be rigid and responsible, but a lot of Republicans think if Dems want to just talk about Jan. 6 between now and the midterm election — good luck.” In that case, they might want to have a chat with their Dear Leader who can’t shut up about the Big Lie that’s at the heart of this entire crisis. If anyone’s keeping January 6th alive, it’s Donald Trump. 

Salon

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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