(Dobbs) Prosecuting The Prosecutors
Trump carries grudges forever. His cult will act on them.
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The latest from the minions of MAGA takes the cliche
about “the pot calling the kettle black” to a whole new level. But it isn’t
funny. It’s frightening.
It’s Republican congressman Barry Loudermilk, chairman
of a House Oversight subcommittee, saying Tuesday after releasing a blistering
report on 2022’s “Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the
United States Capitol,” a.k.a. the January 6th Committee, “Until we hold
accountable those responsible, and reform our institutions, we will not fully
regain trust.”
That’s frightening on three levels.
First, because this guy wasn’t talking about
holding Donald Trump accountable, nor the roughly 1,500 members of the mob who
have been prosecuted for attacking the Capitol, including hate groups like the
Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This committee hasn’t lifted its collective
finger to point blame at the actual insurrectionists. No surprise.
Second, because he was talking about prosecuting the prosecutors. If there’s a headline from his committee’s report, it is the stretch of a claim that when Democrats ran the January 6th Committee in 2022, “numerous federal laws were likely broken by Liz Cheney, and these violations should be investigated by the FBI.” Cheney, of course, was one of two Republicans with the courage to serve on that committee and speak truth to power, which meant Donald Trump’s perpetual power over the Republican Party.
Third, it’s frightening because in keeping with the
abandoned values and alternative realities of MAGA world, this guy Loudermilk
said what he said with a straight face.
In the January 6th Committee’s comprehensive 800+ page
report, based on testimony from (as Cheney herself put it) “scores of
Republican witnesses, including many of the most senior officials from Trump’s
own White House, campaign and Administration,” it came to this conclusion about
Donald Trump: that there was enough evidence to convict him for obstruction of
an official proceeding, of conspiracy to defraud the United States, of
conspiracy to knowingly make false statements, and of assisting, aiding, or comforting
an insurrection. They then referred the ex-president for criminal prosecution.
Cheney summed it up after the Republican Oversight
subcommittee threatened her on Tuesday: “January 6th showed Donald Trump for
who he really is — a cruel and vindictive man who allowed violent attacks to
continue against our Capitol and law enforcement officers while he watched
television and refused for hours to instruct his supporters to stand down and
leave.”
If this vengeful new witch hunt against Cheney and
fellow Trump adversaries doesn’t prove her right, nothing does.
Let us not forget, despite his narcissistic lies about it, Donald Trump has not been absolved of the four criminal charges stemming from January 6th for which a grand jury unanimously indicted him. The only reason he will not be held accountable is because, yielding to Justice Department guidelines that prohibit charges against a sitting president, and bolstered by the Supreme Court’s Trump-prompted ruling about presidential immunity, special counsel Jack Smith was forced last month to drop the case.
Now, freed of the threat of prosecution, which he calls persecution, Trump is at the top of the heap again and almost every Republican is in thrall of his power. So when he promises to pardon the insurrectionists, they cheer. When he posts on his website at 3 o’clock Wednesday morning that “Liz Cheney could be in a lot of trouble based on the evidence obtained by the subcommittee” and praises Loudermilk and his subcommittee for “a job well done,” they get on the bandwagon.
When he tells an interviewer earlier this month about
his accusers, “Honestly, they should go to jail,” they genuflect. When his
choice to head the FBI chillingly emulates despots and tells Trump’s
adversaries, “We’re going to come after you,” they don’t flinch.
Although we know full well that the Republican
Oversight subcommittee members are nothing more than Machiavellian allies in
Donald Trump’s revenge tour, they say they’re specifically going after Cheney
for witness tampering because, as co-chair of the January 6th Committee, she
met with the former assistant to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, Cassidy
Hutchinson, who became one of the January 6th Committee’s star witnesses. She’s
the one who testified under penalty of perjury that Trump had been warned by
trusted aides before January 6th that his campaign to overturn the election
could cause violence, that he was warned on January 6th that some of the
supporters he encouraged to march to the Capitol were armed, and that during
the violence, he callously gave his blessing to their chants to “Hang Mike
Pence.”
Perhaps Hutchinson’s biggest sin though was that she
embarrassed Trump with her testimony about once walking into the White House
dining room after a Trump rant where she “noticed there was ketchup dripping on
the wall and there was a shattered porcelain plate on the floor.” Like a
petulant child, Trump had thrown his lunch at the wall.
By offering Hutchinson counsel and protection against
Trump’s henchmen, Cheney made her testimony possible. That’s why they’re going
after her.
But Liz Cheney is not the only one in the crosshairs.
January 6th Committee co-chair Bennie Thompson is on the Oversight
subcommittee’s revenge list for how they say he handled files and transcripts.
Then-speaker Nancy Pelosi is on the list not because she served on the
committee but simply because she assembled it. For good measure, Jack Smith’s
on it too.
There is a rich irony in all of this. This is the same House Oversight Committee that released a report last year with the title, “The Bidens’ Influence Peddling Timeline,” but couldn’t manage to actually produce evidence of a Biden influence peddling timeline. The proof of their impotence is simple: if they’d found anything incriminating enough to impeach Joe Biden, you know they would have. They didn’t.
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