WILL TRUMP DO HARD TIME OR NO TIME?
Barring some kind of major announcement, such as that the 45th president will be appearing on QVC to promote a new line of makeup for the septuagenarian jet set, we’re pretty much done with the surprise elements in the fallout from the Jan. 6 narrative.
While the House committee is to be commended for its exhaustive investigation, its meticulous presentation, and especially the fact that the most devastating testimony against the insurrectionists was coughed up by Trump administration insiders and their Republican poodles, much of what is concluded in its final report was plainly evident as night fell on Washington, D.C., two years ago this Friday.
From in and around the White House, a truth-averse man who could not accept defeat, either then nor now, summoned his most violent supporters to the city, enraged them at a midday rally, told them to “fight like hell,” and sent them to the U.S. Capitol to stop by any means necessary, including hanging the vice president, the Constitutional counting of electoral votes that is the essence of American democracy — and that man was the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump.
As committee member Jamie Raskin, D.-Md., finally said when the panel’s 850-some page report was about to drop, “This is not an Agatha Christie novel; we know exactly whodunit.”
Probably because it all happened in broad daylight on live national television.
It happened despite the pleadings of the president’s own family and his most dogged loyalists to stop the violence, including the frantic texts of Donald Trump Jr., who couldn’t reach his own father except through Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Trump Jr. told the committee he couldn’t remember how he came to be a featured speaker at the Jan. 6 pre-attack pep rally, according to CNN, nor could he remember that something called Turning Point Action paid him and his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle, tens of thousands of dollars each for speaking at the rally on the ellipse.
Imagine for yourself the kind of life where you can’t remember exactly where or when you picked up $30,000 or $60,000 and considered it “sort of” paid.
Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who with fellow Trump lawyer John Eastman conceived and tried to implement the scheme to provide Mike Pence with electors he could substitute for the ones he was supposed to be counting on Jan. 6, wound up invoking his Fifth Amendment right when the committee interviewed him.
“I believe my Fifth Amendment privilege covers this entire subject matter in terms of any involvement with the alternate electors,” Chesebro testified, and added this gem upon failing to admit he was the Kenneth Chesebro listed in relevant emails obtained by the committee: “I think I would take the Fifth in terms of authenticating a document that is related to the subject matter as to which I’m taking the Fifth.” Uh-huh.
Trump himself took the Fifth on an unrelated prosecution as recently as August, and might again one day, a couple of thousand times.
The notion that a former president will ever be indicted, much less tried, on any of the charges the Jan. 6 committee referred to the Department of Justice remains in the tomorrow-never-comes purview of Attorney General Merrick Garland and special prosecutor Jack Smith. So far, DOJ has a 99.8% conviction rate on Jan. 6 crimes charged against more than 900 people.
Many people are saying, to invoke one of Trump’s most abused verbal crutches, that 2023 is the year Trump goes down hard.
Believe it when you see it.