The January 6 Hearings: Surprise!

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to summer reruns . . . the legend continues.

The January 6 House select committee is having a special hearing, scheduled for today at the last minute, with new, timely evidence that the committee members say can't wait.

If they can't put off a hearing around this evidence until July, it must be really, really important.

As far as Trump is concerned, it could even be . . . a smoking gun.

The hearing today starts at 1:00 P.M. Eastern.

The January 6 Hearings - Part Two

Yesterday's January 6 hearing produced a new term - "team normal."

A hybrid of taped and live testimony centered on the comments of former Attorney General William Barr, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, former U.S. Attorney for Northern District of Georgia Byung Jin Pak, Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg (who represented George W. Bush on the 2000 Florida vote recount), and former Republican Philadelphia Commissioner Al Schmidt, who all looked into claims f afraid from Donald Trump at one time or another.  Among those testifying, Barr and Pak were Trump appointees, and Stepien joined the Trump 2020 presidential campaign late in the game to improve Trump's poll numbers against Biden.  All of them came to the conclusion that there was no fraud and that Trump. assuming he really believes he defeated Biden in the presidential election, doesn't know what he's talking about when he claims fraud.  These Trump aides and appointees were called "team normal" because they looked at the accusations of fraud objectively and thoroughly and ultimately told Trump what he didn't want to hear.  But "team normal" last to the crazies - including an inebriated Rudolph Giuliani - advising Trump.

Well, we all knew that.  We also knew, as former Fox News editor Chris Stirewalt testified yesterday, that once Biden won Arizona, there was no way Trump could win nationally.  So there were no bombshells today?  Well, there was this one.  January 6 Senior Investigative Counsel Amanda Wick revealed, in a pre-taped explanation, that Trump raised a quarter of a billion dollars off the lie that there was voter fraud and said it was going to fight voter fraud.  Instead, it went to conservative activist groups engaged in anything but that.

Everyone is calling yesterday a horrible day for Donald Trump.  But it was also a horrible day for President Biden - the Dow fell 876 points over worries of inflation and a possible recession.  To those worried that Trump might try to steal the 2024 presidential election - he actually might win it fair and square.

The danger on the rocks has surely not passed. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part One

I think it's fair to say that the House January 6 select committee's televised hearings stormed out of the gate the other night. 

The committee showed new footage of the insurrection from that day, putting it into proper context and outlining a basic narrative that subsequent hearings will follow.  In addition, ranking Republican Vice Chair Liz Cheney of Wyoming laid out a blunt, outlined seven-point plan Trump had to keep the Presidency despite his loss to Joe Biden.  It reads as follows:

• President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.
• President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.
• President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.
• President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.
• President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.
• President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.
• As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

The facts as Cheney and Democratic Chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi presented them certainly ft this narrative like a velvet glove.  And then came the iron fists: Former Attorney General William Barr insists that Trump lost the election fair and square, and Ivanka Trump, Donald's pseudo-attractive daughter, agrees with Barr!

Fleshing all of this out was testimony from Capitol Policewoman Caroline Edwards, who recalled the violence at the insurrection and explained how she was pushed back with brute force and blacked out momentarily before resuming her efforts to hold back the mob.  Even more devastating was the testimony from British documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, who was making a film about the polarization of American politics and filming leaders of the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers involved plotting the takeover of the Capitol - on the night of January 5! - thus belying the idea that this "demonstration" was "spontaneous." 

The best is yet to come.  Over the course of more televised hearings this month, the January 6 committee will offer greater details of how that day played out - the better to place the blame for the insurrection squarely on Trump.  Republicans - and Trump - are already calling this a partisan witch hunt, insisting that it's better to investigate the root causes of January 6 by looking into electoral irregularities involving vote-by-mail practices as a result of the pandemic - irregularities  that didn't exist - and questions into Speaker Pelosi's role in beefing up security for the electoral vote count.  Liz Cheney, for one, isn't having any of that.  As she said the other night at the first hearing, when she said her fellow Republicans were "defending the indefensible":

"There will come a day when Donald Trump will be gone. But your dishonor will remain."

Will any of this matter? We'll see.

Showtime

The January 6 select committee in the House of Representatives holds its first prime-time hearings tonight one every cable news channel.  (You wiseacres who point out that Fox News isn't airing them can shut up and sit down now; Fox News is a news channel like TLC - formerly The Learning Channel - is still an educational channel.)  Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (below) and his colleagues will go through a carefully structured, chronologically linear, explanatory narrative to show how Trump and his minions coordinated with the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021 and orchestrated the effort to block Joe Biden from assuming the Presidency.

Alas, I don't think it will matter much.  People's attention and concerns have long since shifted elsewhere, and at least a third of the country and at most half of it thinks the election was stolen.  If the Justice Department is working on this case at all, they're at least as far along as the January 6 committee is, and anyway Merrick Garland doesn't need much convincing.  But then, maybe I'm wrong.  Maybe these televised hearings will make a difference. We shall see.    

See You In September

We haven't heard that much from the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, mainly because the U.S. House of Representatives is in recess, but committee members are preparing to go full tilt boogie when the committee reconvenes after Labor Day.

Select committee chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) has already vowed to issue subpoenas to all of the relevant parties in this investigation, and the one public hearing the committee has so far featured powerful testimony from Capitol police officers, one of whom is an immigrant, on the ugliness and the bigotry they faced from the insurrectionists.   Don't confuse the quiet from the committee for crickets.  They'll be back in September, and they're going to be gearing up to get to the bottom of what happened.