The January 6 Hearings - Part Nine

A couple of takeaways from the ninth and possibly final public hearing of the January 6  U.S. House committee:

• Trump planned all along to declare victory before the election was held.  In fact, he more or less planned the whole insurrection.
• Trump tried stop the vote counting as of midnight on November 3/4, 2020, declaring that the Election Day deadline had passed and the vote counting must stop.  There's no such thing as an Election Day deadline; if the votes are not all counted on Election Day, the counting continues until it's done.
• A group of Proud Boys stood outside the rally area in front of the White House, without bothering to go through the metal detectors,  with the intention of marching to the Capitol bearing arms.  The Secret Service was aware of it.
• Trump demanded that the police allow the insurrectionists in to the rally site . . . with their weapons.  The Secret Service had already told Trump that they were armed.
• Trump admitted privately that he knew he'd lost the election.  But he refused to admit it publicly, insisting that the election was stolen in order to embolden his supporters . . . and also because he didn't want people to know he'd actually lost something.
• The leaders of Congress were in deep trouble.  Clips of Nancy Pelosi and Charles Schumer conferring in an undisclosed location during the insurrection filmed by Pelosi's daughter were screened for the hearing, and Speaker Pelosi was clearly beside herself, trying to rally the military and National Guard units in Maryland and Virginia.  The Speaker herself was ready to curse - "Oh, sh--" - and even as he was ready to say it in the holding room, the insurrectionists were doing it in the House chamber!
• Speaker Pelosi hoped Trump would march to the Cpatoil with his supporters so she could "punch him out" for trespassing on Capitol grounds.
• The committee subpoenaed Trump.  It remains to be seen whether he'll comply (spoiler: he won't!),

You know, sometimes I think of the late Liz Smith and how she "invented" Trump, personally disliking him but writing so incessantly about him in in her gossip column that she made him famous enough to go national and eventually become a reality TV host and run for President.  Smith said that Trump was "the king of hyperbole and he had just the requisite touch of Elvis vulgarity to endear him to the common man."

So that's it  - a gossip columnist writing for a New York tabloid created President Donald Trump.

And for that I can never forgive her. 

The January 6 Hearings - Part Eight

The public hearings of the U.S. House select committee investigating the January 6 attempt to stop the certification of the presidential election of 2020 are over until the fall, but they went out for the summer with a bang.

The committee, under the stewardship of Vice Chair Liz Cheney (Chairman Bennie Thompson came in remotely due to a COVID infection), illustrate how Donald Trump spent the three hours and change - 187 minutes to be exact - in which the insurrection at the Capitol took place.  He made no effort to contact the military or law enforcement even as is top advisers and even his daughter Ivanka urged him to call off his dogs.  The government officials who were trying to do just that were Senate leaders Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence.  Pence was closer to the insurrectionists seeking to make him the first Vice President to be assassinated than many people originally suspected, and  many agents protecting the Vice President were convinced they weren't going to get out alive.  Trump's two tweets during the insurrection only egged on the insurrectionists to do their worst.

Here's how afraid people are to testify against Trump: The agents protecting Pence testified anonymously.

I know it may be in bad taste to make light of that, but before the hearing, the committee reported that these agents would testify in disguise, which intrigued CNN anchor Jake Tapper.  I was hoping they'd testify in public, possible wearing ski masks, fake beards, or from behind a partition, but in fact they audio-recorded their testimonies in advance and their voices were distorted.  Mascot costumes would have been a neat way to disguise them for public testimony, or maybe painted clown faces, but you can't have everything.

Here's one funny detail: Although Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri expressed solidarity with the insurrectionists-to-be as he entered the Capitol to take part in the certification of the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election . . .

. . . he high-tailed it out of there when they came in with full guns a-blazin' - he was HAWLIN' ASS!

Fa-fa-fa-fa, fa-fa-fa-fa-fa-far better . . ..  Run, run, run, run, run, run, run away! 😛

But even this wasn't as much of a hoot as the outtakes of Donald Trump trying to tape a statement the next day condemning the violence he encouraged without selling himself out - and refusing to say he lost the election.  Or the word "yesterday."  Man, that was more entertaining than finding the lost take of Bob Dylan singing "She's Your Lover Now" in its entirety!

Representative Cheney ended the hearing applauding the patriotism of Trump supporters but declaring that they'd been had by Trump, especially those of them who chose to take part in the insurrection.  She probably had as much luck reaching them as Abraham Lincoln had in his first inaugural address when he urged Southerners not to start a civil war.  But Cheney, wearing white in recognition of the women's suffrage movement of over a hundred years ago, also made it a point to thank the many women - may of them loyal to Trump who testified against him and helped set the record straight.

Hint: She wants to run for President.    

I know this is going to upset a lot of Democrats, but the woman who may finally break the mother of all glass ceilings - in addition to saving our democracy - may be a conservative Gen Xer from the West, and not a coastal bourgeois liberal Baby Boomer.  But she will be from a dynasty.

I can't wait to see what the committee has in store for September.

There's still one thing I don't get . . . Jared Kushner was in the shower?   

The January 6 Hearings - Part Seven

The latest public January 6 hearing was full of more incredible revelations, not the least of which was Trump White House Counsel Pat Cipollone walking into a rambunctious White House meeting on the plot to help keep Trump in power and wondering what the hell members of Trump's kitchen Cabinet - including the guy from Overstock.com - were doing there.  (At one point, the use of the military to seize voting machines was discussed.)  Just before the certification of the electoral vote in Congress, Trump loyalists openly discussed online the idea of committing bloodshed and murder against political enemies.  Stephen Ayres, the live witness with the Archie Andrews hair and the Dilton Doiley glasses, was very contrite in having gone to Washington on January 6 to take part in a demonstration only to get sucked up in the insurrection, and he apologized to Harry Dunn, a police officer who had been on duty that day.  (Officer Dunn still can't accept his apology.)

But none of this compares to Donald Trump encouraging supporters to come to Washington armed and dangerous and ensuring that the National Park Service, which takes care of the public space in the middle of town, would not learn of Trump's plans to send the MAGA mob to go to the Capitol.  It was not a spontaneous insurrection; it was carefully planned by a megalomaniac who couldn't accept the fact that he lost a presidential election and kept insisting that it was stolen.   

Liz Cheney said it best when she said that Trump, as a septuagenarian who is capable of understanding that he's not an impressionable child, he should have known better and accepted his loss.  Even Trump's 2016 campaign manager expressed regret for helping him defeat Hillary Clinton.  But something else Representative Cheney said was a signal to the Justice Department to go after Trump.  She revealed that a witness no one has heard from yet received a call from Trump and was pressured not to testify against him.  So, Trump committed the crime of witness tampering.     

If we don't stop Trump now, how will we be able to stop him later?

The January 6 Hearings - Part Six

And what did we learn at yesterday's hearing? Donald Trump not only loves violence done in his name, he does it in his own name.  He even likes to throw his lunch against the wall when he gets news he doesn't like.

I've heard of average men (Leon Czolgosz, Lee Harvey Oswald) who murdered Presidents, but I'd never heard of a President who attempted to murder an average man. And while Indian leader Indira Gandhi may have been killed by her own bodyguards, I could not, until now, imagine a bodyguard being killed by his own leader.  

Or a leader accused of an attempted carjacking.

But we all know now that Donald J. Trump encouraged violence by allowing the crowd that assembled for his fight speech on the morning of January 6, 2021 to attend his rally without surrendering their weapons so they could use them when they approached the Capitol.  We know that his promise to go down to the Capitol with his supporters was not an empty promise.  He wanted to go and ordered his Secret Service man to take him there in the presidential monster wagon.  When the agent refused, Trump reiterated his order, yelling, "I'm the f**kin' President!"  When the agent refused again, Trump tried to hijack the vehicle and grab the agent by the collarbone . . . and could have possibly choked him.  

And then White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows just sat back and took it all in stride.  And White House Counsel Pat Cippolone had to bend over backwards to keep Trump from going down to the Capitol and open up himself and the administration to a whole slew of crimes. 

And we all know this thanks to Mark Meadows' deputy, Cassidy Hutchinson.

My heroine!

It should be only a matter of time before Trump's rear end is hauled into a federal courtroom for indictment.

The good news is that Trump is likely not going to be able to run for President in 2024.  The bad news? Hell, we'll get DeSantis!

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.