January 6th legal proceedings and investigations megathread

[GeneralMacArthur]

I concur.  Having a really hard time listening to Luttig or following what he's saying.  I've not seen this kind of behavior before.  What he's saying isn't even that interesting, it's just "the 12th amendment doesn't allow the Vice President to singlehandedly pick the President", explained in thousands of words over dozens of minutes.

[GeneralMacArthur]

LOL all this drama in the hearings and Trump is gonna still become president again in a couple years

COPE

I see you have learned nothing during your timeout.

You are a non-American gleefully mocking Americans who are rightfully outraged and concerned over the state of their democracy.

What is the matter with you?

He’s sick and needs serious mental help.

He's the same kind of person who goes up to parents after crisis shootings and tells them their kids are burning in hell, or that they're faking their tears and the kids were all crisis actors, or that their children deserved to die, and laughs at them.

Yes, these people exist.  They don't get media coverage, thank God.  But they do exist.

And Pieman is one of them.

[GeneralMacArthur]

If Lauren Boebert and Barry Loudermilk were knowingly giving "reconnaissance tours" to future insurrectionists, why didn't they request pardons as well.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Why are people pretending that the secret service is disputing this?  All we have is one anonymous source claiming that three agents would dispute this.  None of the three agents is willing to go under oath.  The anonymous source isn't willing to go under oath -- he's not even willing to reveal his name, so it could literally just be some guy.  The only secret service agent who's actually put his name out there disputing it is Engel.  And I promise you Engel won't go under oath to testify about this, because he's a Trump stooge.  Which means you basically just have to assume he's lying, just like the Trump stooges have been caught lying about this all along.  If you go back a year ago, Engel would probably tell you (not under oath) that he thought the crowd was all antifa.  Please stop letting Trump stooges control the conversation with stupid lies.  Either go under oath or GTFO.

[GeneralMacArthur]

To get a few things straightened out here, I'd like to put down what seems to be the narrative thus far:


The prelude to Jan 6

Trump is guilty of abusing the power of his office to try and overturn a Democratic election by pressuring and attacking governors, secretaries of state, and other various election officials all the way down to low-level elections workers.  That much is beyond any reasonable doubt.

The main question there is whether Trump legitimately believed that the country was in an electoral crisis and he had to act to rescue the republic, or whether he was just grasping at any straw available to him to try and strong-arm his way into a second term.  Republicans have been desperately clinging to the former argument as justification for his actions -- well, if you really believed that a great electoral fraud had been committed, wouldn't you do everything in your power to fight back against it?

I think the committee has done an excellent job thus far of demonstrating that

(A) Trump was told repeatedly, again and again, by everyone close to him, that these notions about the election being stolen were false.  He chose to stick with the Giuliani/Eastman/Ellis circle of BS, but even that crew didn't have a straight story for how the election was stolen.  They kept having to shift from story to story, including a ludicrous story about Italian satellites changing votes.  Their arguments were laughed out of courtrooms across America.

(B) Trump's team took actions indicating that they knew their stories were false.  That's why they had like six different plans for how to switch the results by hook or by crook.  Trump was calling up secretaries of state and demanding that they "find more votes for him."  He was trying to get votes for Biden thrown out.  They had this Ron Johnson scheme where they created fake slates of electors, lied to everyone about what they were doing with the affidavits, and then tried to get them submitted as legitimate electoral votes.  They had people hide inside federal buildings to try and change official documents!

(C) All the people involved in this scheme of BS knew that what they were doing was some illegal BS.  That's why they all were asking for pardons, not even after it was over, but pre-emptively.  Eastman's "I've decided I should be on the list of pardons" is a pretty damning quote.

Put these three things together and there's a pretty clear case that Trump did not actually see himself as some suffering hero trying to defend democracy by whatever means necessary.  He was trying to use whatever strongman tactics were available to him to try and get the election overturned and earn a second term, and all the BS claims about election fraud, or YouTube conspiracy videos, or Italian satellites, or whatever nonsense Rudy was spouting off about in court, was all just pettifoggery to create a means for Republicans to cast reasonable doubt on the election results and for Trump to use exactly the defense he has been using.  Everyone involved knew that it was just a pack of stupid lies, but Trump was willing to pretend to believe them so he could use them as justification for throwing out votes, switching electors, etc.


Jan 6 itself

Although Trump knew all the conspiracy theories about electoral fraud or whatever were BS, he legitimately believed that he could weasel his way into remaining president.  Either by "finding more votes", or throwing out votes cast for Biden, or invalidating the vote count in states that he lost, or invalidating the entire electoral vote count, or having Mike Pence declare that certain states had unclear electoral votes and could not be counted.  He knew that he didn't need the election to actually switch in his favor -- all he needed to do was give the Republican Party license to say that there was "too much confusion" or "the results were unclear", or that the constitutional process had been broken, so that the result of the election would be placed in the hands of bodies that were under Republican control -- ideally the Supreme Court.

Jan 6 was a key part of this plan, because there were two possible options.  The first would be for Mike Pence to somehow introduce separate slates of electors, or invalidate the Biden electors, thus preventing the electoral vote count from happening as described in Article II of the Constitution.  That would create a constitutional crisis that could easily end in the Supreme Court deciding 5-4 that Trump gets to stay president.  The second would be for the actual electoral vote count process to be disrupted such that it doesn't occur on January 6 as required by U.S. Code Title III Chapter I, thus raising a question of whether it was still possible to legally count electoral votes and again leaving it up to the Supreme Court to decide what happens next.

The committee has already shown that Trump went to great lengths to pressure Mike Pence to go along with option 1, and was absolutely furious when he didn't.  The committee has also demonstrated that many close Trump associates -- Giuliani, Eastman, Stone, etc. -- were intricately involved in planning option 2, including conversations with leaders of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary groups.  The committee has also shown that those paramilitary groups had been working very hard to plan the attack on the Capitol.

The committee has not yet shown that Trump himself, or anyone closely connected to him, knew that there was a plan to violently attack the Capitol.  It seems totally implausible to think that they were talking to the Proud Boys just as a coincidence, but Trump's team could claim that they were just talking about the rally, and the plans for a violent attack were kept secret from them.  There are various damning quotes floating around the testimony about how someone "knew things would get violent", e.g. Mark Meadows quote yesterday that "things could get really bad on the 6th."  But we don't have that smoking gun yet of some Proud Boy testifying that he told Rudy he was going to shoot Mike Pence and Rudy said "yeah that sounds good."

However, the case the committee can prove is that once the attack on the Capitol started, Trump was happy for it and wanted it to continue.

To prove this, they will have to establish that (A) Trump was in favor of an attack on the Capitol, and (B) Trump refused to stop it because he wanted it to continue.

(A) has lots of evidence in its favor -- Trump wanted to lead the march to the Capitol, he knew they had weapons and wanted to let them in with those weapons because "they're not here to hurt me", etc. but we still don't have any smoking gun about Trump either wanting them to kill Mike Pence, or wanting them to violently break into the Capitol.  It could all just be a coincidence!  Maybe he just wanted them to go protest outside the Capitol so loudly and mightily that the Congressmen would change their mind and stop counting the electors.  That seems to be the main thing MAGA is arguing right now.

(B) will be hard to prove since anyone testifying to Trump's state of mind that day can just be accused of speculation.  We know he was furious about not being allowed to lead the march.  We have a couple different sources testifying that he said "good" when he heard that the crowd wanted to hang Mike Pence.  We have his tweet attacking Mike Pence while the attack was going on, which combined with his "let him hang" sentiment and the fact that Trump knew the crowd was armed, certainly seems damning.  But we need more testimony about why Trump didn't call off the attack, what other things he said and did that day, etc.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Bannon's pretrial motions were denied by a Trump-appointed judge.  His trial for criminal contempt of Congress starts Monday, barring last-minute delays.

A federal judge ruled Monday that Steve Bannon cannot tell members of a jury he defied a congressional subpoena under orders from former President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, granted government motions to block Bannon from relying on entrapment by estoppel and public authority defenses that would have seen him argue he failed to appear for a deposition before the January 6th Committee because he was following orders from the former president. Bannon served for a time as Trump's 2016 campaign manager and as a senior adviser in the White House, but had been gone from the administration for three years before Jan. 6, 2021.

https://www.wusa9.com/article/news/national/capitol-riots/steve-bannon-cant-tell-a-jury-trump-instructed-him-to-defy-subpoena-judge-rules-january-6-quash-no-defense-contempt-congress/65-f1158043-e29f-4c13-966f-81fd189b5c3c

For more details, see the long Twitter thread that ends here:

https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1546561587250712578

Yet people will still run around claiming that Biden is doing nothing about Trump's anti-democratic coup, that Garland is weak and impotent and unable to meet the moment, and that nobody will suffer any consequences for this.

Nothing matters.  Nothing the administration does counts.  They're about to completely annihilate Steve Bannon but nobody will care.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Kind of a meh day, unless they can get a smoking gun text message where Trump was directly in contact with a leader of the Proud Boys or something, there's really nowhere to go in this vein.

Trump communicated with the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and other right-wing militia groups through intermediaries like Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, and had regular conversations with the main media personalities influencing those groups, such as Alex Jones.  It was in this way that Trump was able to get his instructions to those groups, and find out what those groups needed from him.  This is how Trump was able to get the word out to those groups to organize and prepare for an attack on the Capitol, and this is why Trump knew full well that his tweet with instructions for Jan 6 would be received as a call-to-arms for those groups.  This is why Trump's speech on the ellipse was full of wink-wink usage of their language, and thinly-veiled calls for violence and insurrection.

But this is how Trump operates.  Like any good organized crime syndicate leader, he never actually communicates directly with his thugs, there's always intermediaries and layers so as to create plausible deniability and separation.  He never puts his nefarious commands into writing or any sort of permanent record.

And because of this, Republicans will always be able to defend Trump by acting like he was just some babe in the woods who had no idea what he was doing or what he was saying, who was being led by the nose by folks like Giuliani and Powell, and had no idea what was going to happen, and was then too shocked and confused to stop it.  That's their story and they're sticking with it.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Are there hearings today or no?

[GeneralMacArthur]

So what's the conservative story now?  What's the excuse?  I don't even know what the alternative narrative is supposed to be at this point.

"This was just a peaceful, legitimate protest" has to be done now, right?

"Trump didn't know this was going to happen" and "Trump didn't want this to happen" both done.

"Trump didn't know what was going on" or "Trump condemned the riots so he doesn't bear responsibility" also pretty clearly over now.

[GeneralMacArthur]

Jury deliberations have begun in Bannon's case. So we could potentially get a verdict at any time. FYI: The defense did not put on a case (but did give closing arguments).

I'm excited!  I hope he gets a nice long prison sentence.  I still remember 2015 when Breitbart dominated the media with completely fake stories, moral panics, and a pathological obsession with the outer fringes of both parties.