Presto Chango! The GOP’s Magical Plan to Make the January 6th Hearings Go Away
Presto Chango! The GOP’s Magical Plan to Make the January 6th Hearings Go Away
I already understood that emperor Trump fiddled while the Capitol was besieged
The final hearing of the summer for the House Select Committee on January 6 followed the same formula as earlier presentations: former Trump administration officials testifying about the day interspersed with audio and video snippets designed to reinforce the narrative.
These were all Republicans, all the time, giving accounts of a chief executive who spent the afternoon watching Fox News as the Capitol building was under siege and doing nothing.
There were in-person accounts of what went on in the West Wing on the day from Matthew Pottinger, the former Deputy National Security Advisor, and Sarah Matthews, a former White House press aide who resigned in the aftermath of the riot, along with recorded testimony from Pat A. Cipollone, the former White House counsel, and others to document Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6.
There was new information, sandwiched in between attempts by the committee to drive home the point that the events of that day constituted a threat to the foundations of democracy as we understand it.
I’ll come back to those revelations in a moment.
It’s now possible to see the Republican plan for blunting the impact of these hearings headed into the midterm elections. They’ve moved past calling the committee names to saying the investigation is simply a ploy designed to cover up the wrong-headed policies and mistakes of the Biden administration.
We’re supposed to take a leap of faith and assume that Nancy Pelosi, et.al., knew last year that inflation and the economy would be at the forefront of voter concerns.
Here’s a snip from Gary Abernathy’s op ed at the Washington Post:
For now, the Jan. 6 select committee is promising more episodes between now and November, a logical scenario because these hearings were always as much about distracting everyone from the many domestic problems plaguing voters, with the midterm elections approaching, as about holding the former president accountable and curtailing his future White House hopes.
In other words, “there’s nothing to see here, folks,” even as the committee documents an unprecedented attempt by an incumbent president to prevent a peaceful transition of power.
Despite the protestations of various GOP luminaries in the days following the insurrection –videos of Sen. Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy denouncing the role of the former President were especially damaging– the default Republican position is righteous indignation that Hunter Biden, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter weren’t part of the conversation.
Greg Sargent calls it, also at the Washington Post
On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show Wednesday night, the California Republican essentially came right out and said it: We Republicans refused participation in the committee’s investigation for the express purpose of enabling us to cast it as a partisan exercise and therefore illegitimate.
We can learn something from McCarthy’s buffoonish candor — and from the broader GOP response to the hearings. When the focus is on the raw truth about the scale of the Trump-GOP betrayal of democracy, this bad-faith attempt to pollute revelations of great force by casting Democratic investigators as mere partisan actors shrivels toward irrelevance.
Thus far the public doesn’t seem to be buying what the GOP is selling, even as they really are concerned about the economy. Majorities of Americans blame the Jan. 6 violence on Trump and are paying attention to the hearings, and 50% believe he committed criminal acts. A solid majority views the hearings as fair and impartial.
Back to last night…
I already understood that emperor Trump fiddled while the Capitol was besieged. Weeks of scheming to introduce new slates of electors and persuade state legislatures to question the validity of ballot counting were part of a plan, albeit clumsily executed.
The points that struck me as important were:
The testimony of the anonymous White House security official claiming that members of the Vice President security detail were calling their loved ones to say goodbye because they “thought that this was about to get very ugly” and “were starting to fear for their own lives."
The radio chatter from Pence’s security crew, desperate to get him to safety as the mob, inflamed by Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet denouncing the vice president, advanced to the point where escape routes were threatened.
The outtakes from Trump videos on January 6 and 7, with the then-president struggling to condemn the attack or declare that the election was “over.” Go back and watch the disgust on his face as he clearly wants to avoid the talking points provided for him.
An effective video discrediting blowhard Senator Josh Hawley as he scurried about like a scared rat as the mob advanced in the building. The audience laughed as it was replayed in slo-mo. It showed the true hypocrisy of one of the former president’s staunch defenders. And, yes, it was clapback aimed at one of their own who clearly was outside the bounds of what’s considered proper behavior at the Capitol.
The January 6th committee will be continuing its work through August.
From the New York Times:
“The investigation is still ongoing, if not maybe accelerating,” said Representative Elaine Luria, Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee. “We’re gaining so much new information.”
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Developments outside the hearing were of significance yesterday.
The Secret Service claim about missing messages from January 6 is analogous to the erasure of 18 minutes of White House tape recordings during the Watergate scandal.
Think about it: the agency charged with reconstructing missing cyber evidence for federal law enforcement agencies is now claiming something along the lines of ‘the dog ate my homework.’
It’s certainly a bigger scandal than Hilary’s missing emails.
A few weeks back we were hearing that the Secret Service was going to provide witnesses who would testify under oath –never happened– that Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was bogus.
Now, the investigation into the Secret Service’s deleted text messages has been upgraded to a criminal investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. The agency has retained outside counsel, a sure sign of trouble on the horizon...
…Or not.
The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general Joseph Cuffari, Phd (that’s how he signs his name on documents) is a Trump appointee, who got caught in the act of falsifying his educational background. His “Phd in philosophy” turned out to be from a diploma mill and was magically converted to a “Phd in management” when questioned about the degree.
He is a political hack. From Mother Jones:
Cuffari, whom Trump nominated in November 2018, is the kind of laissez-faire watchdog Trump is looking for. A senior staffer in Cuffari’s office told the Washington Post in March that the office was often empty, well before the pandemic hit. House Oversight Committee Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) noted in a March letter to Cuffari that his office had completed only 20 reports this fiscal year, compared to 58 during the same period in 2018, before Cuffari’s tenure.“You have released reports at a slower pace than your predecessors for every year since 2003—the first year your office began issuing reports,” Maloney wrote.
Now Cuffari will certainly be showing up to work, making every effort to disprove the notion that the former President corrupted the Secret Service to the point where it was accurate to call it a praetorian guard.
So don’t expect much here.
The conspiracy crowd was waiting outside the Capitol building as the hearing concluded.
Former D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and was beaten by a mob during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, was heckled by a small group of protesters as he attempted to leave.
Video footage posted on social media shows Fanone, who is now an on-air commentator for CNN, being hassled by protesters. A woman who follows Fanone is seen asking why he was at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and questioning his credentials as a law enforcement officer as she points two phone cameras at him. As he walks away from the hecklers, the woman and other people follow him.
Perhaps the scariest story coming out of Thursday was Jonathan Swan’s story at Axios about the planning already underway for a second Trump term at the White House.
He names several groups –the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), and the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI)-- hard at work crafting a plan to purge the so-called deep state from the government, one that could involve the dismissal of up to 50,000 federal employees.
Their work could accelerate controversial policy and enforcement changes, but also enable revenge tours against real or perceived enemies, and potentially insulate the president and allies from investigation or prosecution.
They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda.
The preparations are far more advanced and ambitious than previously reported. What is happening now is an inversion of the slapdash and virtually non-existent infrastructure surrounding Trump ahead of his 2017 presidential transition.
These groups are operating on multiple fronts: shaping policies, identifying top lieutenants, curating an alternative labor force of unprecedented scale, and preparing for legal challenges and defenses that might go before Trump-friendly judges, all the way to a 6-3 Supreme Court.
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FYI- The Justice Department has won convictions in 100% of its Jan 6 jury trials so far.
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Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com