THIS CROOKED KILLER NEEDS TO BE IN JAIL

 

The More We Learn 

Dan Rather 

 and  

Elliot Kirschner 

 

I have lived a long life. My choice of career has taken me around the world and put me many times on the front lines of momentous history. I have seen bravery and depravity, hope and fear, war and peace. I have seen leaders uplift and destroy, unite and divide, calm and incite.  

I have lived in a world where I quickly came to learn that almost anything was possible, where I was never surprised by the propensity of events to surprise me. But I never could have imagined the United States would find itself in its current position.  

With each significant chapter in the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump, we have experienced a rising tide of outrage, disgust, and disbelief, as well as a pervasive queasiness — is this really happening? What are we not seeing, behind the scenes? How bad can this get?  

The events around the last election, building toward the coup attempt of January 6, were obviously dire and significant as we tried to process them in real time. We knew we had come close to losing something precious, but how close, and how much was really at risk? The unknowns and “what ifs” spiraled in our imaginations.  

With the inauguration of Joe Biden, there was a sense of a return to at least a precarious order — in that the winner of the election had indeed become president. But the threat continued, and it still does. We will consider the specifics of these threats more fully in future posts.  

But here now, in the wake of yet another jaw-dropping day of hearings by the January 6 committee, we can say that as bad as we knew it was at the time, it could have been worse. A lot worse. The Capitol could have been the scene of a bloodbath, with senior political leaders hunted and killed by a mob whipped up by the president and bent on vengeance. We might have sensed that before, but today made it chillingly clear how close we came to this outcome.  

We know how hell-bent Trump was on having Vice President Mike Pence blow up the Constitution and leaving him to the mob if he didn’t. To his everlasting credit, Pence bucked the pressure from a would-be autocrat skulking and plotting in the White House. The president’s enablers were warned of carnage in the streets and in the halls of Congress. They didn’t care. The president didn't care. The evidence suggests that that was what he wanted.  

We are still learning more, and a story is emerging that still shocks many of us to a place of disbelief. I suspect that the committee members, as expertly as they have produced these hearings for maximum impact, are unsure where this will eventually lead. Case in point is the call for Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, to testify for her role in the insurrection.  

The twists and turns to come will likely still force us to contemplate that which is now beyond the limits of our imagination. Yesterday’s hyperbole is tomorrow’s old news. One thing we can all be thankful for is that truth is being served and history will know that a president attacked his own country. What that means for the man or the nation remains to be seen. It can get worse, a lot worse. But that might also be the path by which we get better.  

What We Learned About Trump, Pence, and the January 6th Mob 

The third hearing on the attack on the Capitol revealed that the Proud Boys would have killed the Vice-President “if given the chance.” 

 

By Susan B. Glasser 

It’s been hard, these last couple of weeks, to watch and rewatch the horrifying events of January 6, 2021. As the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol has conducted its televised hearings, they have played video clips of the violence over and over again. No image is more memorable—and more disturbing—than that of the wooden gallows Donald Trump’s supporters erected on the Capitol lawn as rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence! Hang Mike Pence!” The committee documented that those threats were real. According to an F.B.I. affidavit the panel highlighted on Thursday, a government informant said that members of the far-right militant group the Proud Boys told him they would have killed Pence “if given the chance.” The rioters on January 6th almost had that chance, coming within forty feet of the Vice-President as he fled to safety. 

The malice of those in the crowd toward Pence, the holier-than-thou evangelical Christian who had spent the previous four years as Donald Trump’s slavishly loyal sidekick, was remarkable. 

“If Pence caved we’re going to drag motherfuckers through the streets,” one rioter was captured on video saying. “He deserves to burn with the rest of them,” another said. A man with a bullhorn agitated the crowd. “Mike Pence has betrayed the United States of America,” he informed the already agitated mob. “Mike Pence has betrayed this President.” He finished with a threat and a promise: “We will never, ever forget.” 

The explosive ending of the Trump Presidency has always been a story about the rift between Trump and Pence—two of the most mismatched figures ever to be thrown into a marriage of political convenience. For four years, Trump had tested and tried his sanctimonious No. 2, but Pence never broke. Not in public, not, as far as we can tell, in private, either. He was famous during the Trump years for doing and saying almost nothing that would make news. When he debated Kamala Harris during the 2020 campaign, his most memorable moment was when a fly landed on his impeccably coiffed white hair and he did not react for the full two minutes that it sat on his head. 

But on January 6th, Pence finally did break with Trump, refusing to go along with the President’s absurd, illegal, and unconstitutional plot to have his Vice-President single-handedly overturn the will of the American people and block Congress’s confirmation of Joe Biden’s victory. On Thursday, the House committee devoted its hearing to attempting to explain Trump’s scheme to pressure Pence—which unfolded in a series of inflammatory Presidential tweets, angry phone calls, and bizarre White House meetings that were a mix of constitutional-law seminars and live reënactments of “The Godfather.” The committee introduced a new villain to a national television audience: John Eastman, the former law professor who concocted the absurd legal theory that Pence could unilaterally overturn the election—a concocted counterpart to what U.S. District Judge David Carter recently skewered as “a coup in search of a legal theory.” 

If the hearing was designed to eviscerate the professional standing of Eastman, it succeeded blisteringly well. He was shown to be inconsistent, not on the level, and legally and historically shoddy in his work. Greg Jacob, Pence’s former counsel, testified that Eastman even acknowledged, at one point, that he knew his theory was unconstitutional and would likely be unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court—if it ever got there. The committee’s biggest reveal of the day was an e-mail from Eastman to Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, asking for a Presidential pardon for himself. “I’ve decided that I should be on the pardon list, if that is still in the works,” Eastman wrote. Lawyers who don’t think they did anything wrong are not in the habit of asking for pardons. When called for a deposition by the panel, Eastman cited his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination a hundred times, Representative Pete Aguilar of Texas revealed. 

But, of course, Americans don’t really care about John Eastman. Nor should they. It was President Trump who desperately seized on Eastman’s absurd argument that the Vice-President determines the winner of Presidential elections. It was Trump who brought this buffoon into the White House, Trump who demanded that Pence attend repeated meetings with him, and Trump who charged ahead with the plot. 

Trump did not care what Eastman’s legal theories were. He just wanted him to provide one. His goal was to keep power by whatever means necessary. Once again, the January 6th panel presented compelling evidence that Trump personally orchestrated the campaign—inflaming the mob when Pence did not cave in, as Trump apparently expected, after four years of caving in. In a dramatic phone call from the Oval Office on the morning of January 6th, with his family arrayed around him listening, the President berated and castigated his Vice-President. Trump called him a “wimp,” according to one witness. A former aide to Trump’s own daughter Ivanka recalled Ivanka telling her that Trump had called Pence a “pussy.” When Pence rebuffed him anyway, Trump, a few hours later, tweeted his anger at Pence’s lack of “courage”—even as the mob stormed the Capitol. “It felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire,” one of his White House officials, Sarah Matthews, testified regarding the tweet. 

Purely by coincidence, I’m sure, Thursday’s hearing took place on the seventh anniversary of the day when Trump kicked off his Presidential campaign with that famous escalator ride down to the lobby of Trump Tower. Soon after the hearing ended, I received a fund-raising e-mail from Trump asking, “Do you remember this day 7 years ago?” and promising that if I sent him money by 11:59 p.m. I would both get my name on “the 2022 Trump Donor Wall” and have my gift “INCREASED by 600%.” (How, exactly, was not clear.) The Trump grift continues. 

And that, really, was the bigger point of Thursday’s debates about the language of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and the powers vested in the Vice-Presidency. Trump remains not only an e-mail-fund-raising huckster but also the subject of historical inquiry. He continues to be what retired the federal judge Michael Luttig, a conservative legal icon who advised Pence, called him at Thursday’s hearing: a “clear and present danger” to the nation. ♦