The leaders of the Jan. 6 Committee are making clear at the top of Thursday’s hearing that the committee viewed the Capitol attack not as a one-day event but as the climax of a months-long attempt to subvert the democratic will of the American people — an attempt that they said was ongoing.
Liz said some of her colleagues asked for pardons. I had not heard that before
What we’re seeing is quite powerful yet I still wonder if it will have any significant effect. I hope it will, but I’m really not sure.
Neither had I but the highlight was POS Perry, my Congressman, is the pig I thought he was.
Traitors are among us, the enemy is among us, terrorists are among us, sedition plotters are among us, insurrectionists are among us. It has been proven, and is being proven again.
First I knew of that. Also new to me was that the Proud Boys (about 200) gathered at the Capitol before Trump’s speech at the Ellipse. Strong implication that the insurrection was pre-planned.
A well spent two hours. Watch it if you didn’t get to see it live. The rest of the live hearings will provide more details and witness statements we haven’t see yet.
Liz Cheney is a particularly good narrator for this case. She is articulate and trustworthy. I am not sure how the GOP can credibly rebut this.
All the tentacles of a huge conspiracy are also becoming very apparent, as well as Trump’s role as the head of the conspiracy. Good night for democracy.
I have a feeling there might be more coming about him.
The bigger question to me is, given their voters, do they even have to rebut it? I doubt we will see much rebutting being done.
There is a reasonable conclusion that can be reached that the White House was actively engaged in at the very least trying to forcibly delay the Jan 6 electoral certification. Somewhere along the line - probably through Bannon and others of his deluded ilk - they decided to coordinate a group of on-the-ground thugs to cause trouble and provide a reason to delay the proceedings. What they didn’t count on was that the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers had their own ideas and were nuts enough to see their coordination with the WH as proof that they were given carte blanche to cause mayhem. Add a huge crowd of people ready to go wild and there you have Jan. 6.
That’s huge. That list is going to blow some doors open when it comes out.
And given how openly hysterical Jim Jordan was on his own Twitter account, and by highjacking the House Judiciary Minority account, last night, it’s crystal clear why he has refused to cooperate, why Republicans tried to put him specifically on to sabotage it and why Nancy said “GTFOH with that.”
“your dishonor will remain”
Well, for those who can see it. The GQP left “honor” behind long ago, along with “shame” and “honesty.” Let’s hope enough voters still understand these concepts.
Exactly!
The thing that jumped out and smacked me in the face was the timeline of Proud Boys blowing off Trump’s speech to make sure they were in position and in front of the mob before it assembled, and then using the riot as cover to insert teams, “stacks,” as the they were called in the presentation, with very evident specific missions while the mere morons kept the Capitol Police occupied.
This is what happened in Benghazi-teams of terrorists on a mission using an incited riot as cover for a terrorist mission. And it just so happens that the people up to their asses in this mess, in and out of Congress, obsessed on Benghazi for 19 months.
Add in Roger Stone’s involvement with the Proud Boys, ostentatiously using them as “security” the day before the attack and DoJ’s elevation of charges against their leaders to seditious conspiracy four days before the hearing. And then Tie in DoJ charging the Oathkeepers with seditious conspiracy in January, revealing that some strange reason the Oathkeepers just up and decided they needed to have heavily armed “quick reaction teams” waiting just outside D.C. just in case Trump happened to invoke the Insurrection Act for some reason, and Trump having secret meetings with Flynn, Sydney Powell and others who had been proposing plans to invoke the Insurrection Act way before there was any insurrection, and a very different picture than the conventional narrative emerges.
As of last night, they crossed the “more likely than not” threshold of establishing that the “riot” was intentionally instigated by Trump as part of a planned conspiracy to provide a diversion to cover the insertion terrorist teams into the Capitol. The evidence incontestably establishes the mission was to shut down the electoral vote count long enough for Trump and the coup plotters time to execute their “alternate electors” scheme.
But the evidence also supports but does not yet compel an inference the plan was to, or to also, provide a pretext for the invocation of the Insurrection Act. But to do that, they would need more than just disruption. They would need hostage-taking or serious violence committed against the person of members of Congress. It would not surprise me if getting some of the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers killed in the process of taking back the Capitol was a critical part of the plan.
And when you consider the determination of Congressional leadership and Pence to get the count completed that night and that extraordinary “we don’t do coup’s” message the Joint Chiefs sent out in the days before the mess, it’s clear that OpSec was no tighter than you’d expect from these buffoons. It’s clear that leadership saw the clique of Republicans sitting around yukking it up without a care of in the world while they were sheltering and put the pieces together, as did Pence when he told his Secret Service detail to fuck off. And it’s clear that they had put enough pieces of the plan into action for the by the summer for for Barton Gellman’s September 23, 2020 article in the Atlantic to get published (to much pooh-poohing, derision and eye rolling by the Very Serious Heathers of the Beltway MSM), which was probably on a lot of minds as they sat in their not very secure locations.
Trump, Flynn, Stone, Powell, Giuliani, Bannon, were all in on it, Stone at the operational level. It’s evident that multiple members of Congress were deeply involved, though the extent of their knowledge of the whole plan is unknowable. Very likely Junior and Meadows were, at a minimum, fully aware of it and passively supporting it until it started to fail. The suspicions stoked by the video of the lot of them in that tent, gleefully watching it all unfold on TV have taken on new meaning. Likewise looks a lot like Ivanka and Jared knew what was up early and immediately took steps to put themselves into Albert Speer positions, able to exploit it if it works and deny it if it failed. Mike Lee’s abrupt reversal of position is likewise of great interest.
Is there reasonable doubt? Yeah. I guess. But the last year and a half has dulled us to our lived experience that with Trump, the absolute worst thing you could imagine was going on what was actually happening except when what was actually happening was worse than we could imagine.
I’m rambling here because I knew watching the hearing was going to give me insomnia and yeah, it did so I stayed up 'til 2:00 watching the replay. But last night was the opening argument laying out a case that the media narrative of a series of disjointed, flailing, almost comically inept actions and a protest that was allowed to get out of hand because of Trump’s ego problems rather than intentionally incited has collapsed. There will be many in the media who will not take kindly to that, or to the reversal of their long patient labor to engineer an exciting Content generating midterm turnover, and begin insidiously trying to undermine it, making them willing conduits to whatever counterfactuals the coup plotters care to spew. (Peter Baker in particular has been revealed as a complete, Javanka fluffing ass today, and he will not respond to it by admitting fault or failure).
One last thought. We don’t think about this much, but coup attempts fail as often as not. Even in countries with a history of coups, they often fail because it’s not easy to come up with a plan that both covers all the bases that have to be covered and is simple enough and flexible enough to work. Timing is crucial. Luck is required. A level of breadth inconsistent with operational security is required. The ones that work usually are in countries where all you have to do is send a team to the presidential palace to accidentally kill the president, take over a single state broadcasting monopoly’s headquarters and have enough brass, or leaders with enough popularity and charisma, to make the troops who weren’t in on it obey.
But nonetheless, for all the buffoonery and delusional nuttery of the principles of this attempt, it came frighteningly close to working. Key elements and gambits were thwarted by the refusal of key actors to be coopted, in DoJ, in the White House Counsel’s Office and in the Pentagon, but the larger plot was not exposed and disrupted by coordinated action and a competent media before it was tried. And the Oh So Worldly and Worldly Savvy nihilism and bothsidesing Normalcy Bias of our degenerate political press is a key reason it almost succeeded. And they’re still at it. Even as of today, they’re still at it.
This is a powerful analysis. Well done!
