Jan. 6: Pressure, unsung heroes and Trump’s Watergate echoes
WASHINGTON » The House Jan. 6 committee launched under deep political skepticism: What more could be said about the deadly insurrection at the Capitol in 2021 that played out for all the world to see?
Quite a lot, it turns out. The public hearings this month are showing in vivid and clear detail just how close the United States came to a constitutional crisis when President Donald Trump refused to admit his election defeat. Trump tried to use the powers of the presidency to stop Democrat Joe Biden from being certified the winner. When that didn’t work, Trump summoned a mob to the Capitol.
Despite the unprecedented Capitol attack, the hearings carry echoes from U.S. history.
Like the Watergate hearings 50 years ago, the 1/6 committee has depicted a president “detached from reality,” as Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, testified. As happened during the anti-communist McCarthy era, the testimony has provoked counter-reaction — a sense of the civic decency coming from civil servants, including many fellow Republicans, who did their jobs, despite grave personal risk, to ensure that the 2020 election was legitimate.
The “backbone of democracy,” as the committee chairman, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., put it.
What we know so far from the Jan. 6 public hearings and what’s coming next.
‘Over and over again’
Almost everyone around Trump understood he was losing the Nov. 3, 2020, election.
From his campaign manager Bill Stepien, who encouraged Trump on election night to not yet claim victory, to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, who testified she knew it was too early to say he had won.
But Trump nevertheless latched onto false claims of voter fraud and declared himself the winner.
“Over and over again,” the defeated president was told there was no evidence of election fraud that could have tipped the outcome to him, said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., opening the committee’s hearings.
Trump was told by his own campaign team that the numbers just weren’t there for him and by Barr, who told Trump flatly that the claims being made of a fraudulent election were simply “bull—-.”
Yet one influential figure had the president’s ear.
Lawyer Rudy Giuliani made his way to see Trump at the White House election night party and encouraged him to declare victory. Witnesses testified that Giuliani was inebriated and they tried to keep him away — all claims Giuliani has since said are untrue.
‘Legitimize the lies’
Trump began a relentless campaign, in public and private, to try to stop Biden’s victory, according to the committee’s investigation.
Trump leaned on officials from the highest levels of government to find more votes or reject those electors already affirmed. He filed dozens of legal challenges in closely contested states, hoping to flip his defeat to victory.
When one judge after another, many of whom Trump had appointed, rejected or declined to take up the lawsuits, Trump used the power of his presidency to pressure officials to act.
“Find 11,780 votes,” Trump demanded of Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state in Georgia, a state Trump narrowly lost.
Arizona’s Republican House speaker testified about a call from Trump in which the president made an unprecedented proposal to reject the slate of electors for Biden, who had won the state.
Trump’s own Department of Justice was hounded by a president calling at all hours during the Christmas holiday season for investigations into his far-flung theories of fraud, former officials testified.