A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER
Jan. 6 Hearings Probe Exposes a Danger to American Democracy
“Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” said retired appeals court judge Michael Luttig — an icon of the conservative legal establishment. “That’s not because of what happened on Jan. 6,” but because they’ve pledged they’d do it again in 2024, he testified in the third hearing of the January 6 Select Committee, on June 16. The January 6 hearings have accomplished two main things so far: First, they’ve demolished former president Donald Trump’s twin big lies about the stolen election and the J6 insurrection he mounted. Second, they’ve begun to expose key elements of what Trump was actually trying to do — nothing short of using violence to subvert the orderly transition of power. They’ve shown that the timing of actions by indicted members of the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers revealed that the violence was pre-planned, not the result of an innocent demonstration “getting out of hand.” But what they haven’t done is counter the threat Luttig highlighted. The twin lies were demolished in the very first hearing. Trump insiders provided clear evidence that Trump certainly knew his claims of having won the election were bogus — and thus he had criminal intent in trying to hold onto power. Former attorney general William Barr called claims of software manipulation “complete nonsense” and “crazy stuff.”
“You can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view, unsupported by specific evidence, that there was fraud in the election,” Barr said.
And Ivanka Trump followed his lead.
“I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” she said in a taped deposition.
Former Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon and others confirmed the picture.
Further details were fleshed out in the second hearing. A key trigger to how things unfolded was Fox News calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night. A multi-witness tape covering the election night response set up the main distinction of that hearing: the virtually unanimous majority of Trump insiders who took evidence seriously versus a mere two who did not: Donald Trump and an inebriated Rudy Giuliani.
“There was surprise at the call,” Trump’s campaign manager Bill Sepian said. And the atmosphere shifted “Completely,” according to Trump senior advisor Jason Miller. Somewhat later, “There are suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuliani, to go and declare victory and say that we won it outright,” he recalled, but “It was far too early to be making any calls like that,” Sepian said. “It was becoming clear that the race would not be called on election night,” said Ivanka Trump.
Just two people disagreed.
“Mayor Giuliani was saying we won it. They’re stealing it from us,” Miller recalled. “Anyone who didn’t agree with that position was being weak.”
Only Trump felt the same. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” he said early the next morning.
That pattern, set on election night, persisted for the next two months, as the utter lack of evidence of any election fraud gave rise to ever crazier theories. “There was never an indication of interest in what the actual facts were,” Barr said.
A detailed look at Georgia, with testimony from Trump’s U.S. Attorney there, B.J. Pak, was illustrative. Giuliani had shown a Georgia State Senate subcommittee a clip from a security tape at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta which he claimed was a ‘smoking gun’ proving voting fraud. But “Mr. Giuliani only played a clip” from a surveillance tape. “Nothing irregular happened in the counting and the allegations made by Mr. Giuliani were false,” Pak said.
Another Giuliani fantasy was that 8,000 dead people voted in Pennsylvania — specifically Philadelphia — a claim refuted by Al Schmidt, the only Republican member of Philadelphia’s three-member city commission. “Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there wasn’t evidence of eight,” Schmidt told the committee.
He’d received generalized threats before Trump tweeted about him by name, calling him a RINO (Republican in name only) “being used big time by the fake news media.” But, “After the president tweeted at me by name, calling me out the way that he did, the threats became much more specific, much more graphic, and included not just me by name but included members of my family by name, their ages, our address, pictures of our home. Just every bit of detail that you could imagine,” Schmidt said. “That was what changed with that tweet.”
The televised hearings of the January 6 Select Committee. Photo courtesy of C-SPAN
“You see the Republicans shoot ahead” on election day, former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt explained, “But it’s not really a lead.”
Stirewalt’s team at Fox tried to counter Trump by educating viewers, “because the Trump campaign and the president had made it clear that they were going to try to exploit this anomaly,” he said.
Trump actively discouraged Republicans from voting by mail to expand the mirage, ignoring Sepian’s entreaties to the contrary. For Trump, it was less important to actually win the election than to appear to win it on election night, so that he could cry “fraud” when the Democratic votes came in. This was but one example of a broader pattern that the committee has yet to highlight as such: the role of deception as a key element of Trump’s plan — especially deceiving his own base.
They have highlighted examples of it — such as the outlandish conspiracy theories without evidence, or the $250 million raised from small donors for the Official Election Defense Fund, which the committee discovered did not exist, leading committee member Zoe Lofgren to remark, “The big lie was also the big grift.”
should do it today.” So he knew his own theory was bunk. A pretext, nothing more.
Eastman also admitted to Jacob that “we would lose nine nothing” if his theory went to the Supreme Court, but he also believed the Court would decline to hear it as a “political question.” Jacob also witnessed Eastman admit to Trump that his theory violated the 1887 Electoral Count Act. Thus, both men knew that Trump’s plan was illegal and that Pence had no choice. Yet Trump still used it to incite the crowd against Pence — even tweeting another attack as they were chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!”
But if Pence had gone along, Eastman was prepared for much wider violence. Eric Herschmann, a top White House lawyer, recalled telling him what would happen if 78-plus million people had their votes invalidated by one man. “I said, ‘They’re not going to tolerate that. You’re going to cause riots in the streets.’ And he said words to the effect of there has been violence in the history of our country, Eric, to protect the democracy or protect the republic.”
In short, there was no legal or factual foundation for Trump’s attempt to hold onto power, there were only lies and violence — and the threat of it.
It could have been much worse, author/journalist David Neiwert noted on Twitter, providing some insight into why Eastman was so untroubled. “The non-appearance of antifascists on the scene Jan. 6, played a critical role in the failure of Trump’s coup attempt,” Neiwert, an expert on extremism, violence and propaganda, wrote. “Trump had been building the ‘Antifa/BLM/ Violent Left’ narrative all year, but he focused on Antifa particularly after he lost the election, and stepped up the vitriol.”
On Jan. 5 he issued a memorandum declaring Antifa a “terrorist organization.” The Oathkeepers, Proud Boys and QAnon activists were preparing for a battle that never came, because “Antifascists were able to see Trump’s scheme from miles away, and encouraged all their colleagues to avoid the capital city on January 6,” Neiwert wrote. Pence refusing to accept Biden electors was just the first step, which fell apart, he explained. “Then, Trump’s plans to use intended violence between his army of ‘Patriots’ and Antifa as the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act vanished back into the mists of their imaginations.”
It doesn’t seem likely that the committee will pursue this aspect, but the Jan. 5 Antifa memo
Rusty Bowers, GOP Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives described a extensive effort to get him to overthrow the election. Giuliani had claimed 200,000 illegal immigrants had voted, along with thousands of dead people. He asked for names, and Trump told Giuliani, “Give the man what he needs, Rudy.” Bowers testified. But did he get anything? “Never,” Bowers said. It was all hot air.
Besides, the legislature, having established popular election for presidential electors, “it becomes a fundamental right of the people,” that the legislature can’t simply revoke, he explained. “It is a tenant of my faith that the constitution is divinely inspired — of my most basic foundational beliefs. So for me to do that because someone just asked me to? It’s foreign to my very being,” Bowers said.
But the most terrorized individuals were Fulton County election worker Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, who assisted her as a volunteer. They were both on the misleading tape Giuliani played, after which Trump doubled, attacking Freeman 18 times by name. Moss testified in person, but her mother’s taped testimony cut the deepest. She’s virtually withdrawn from public life out of fear.
“There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere,” Freeman said. “Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States targeting you?