January 6 committee

Is this news? Mike Pence “seized the spotlight” in DC this weekend when he “slammed former president Donald Trump in what amounts to his strongest criticism to date of his former running mate.”  Of course Pence did. He is, for the time being, running for president. Naturally he is going to set his sights on the the biggest beast in the room. And that beast, in case you haven’t noticed, is Donald Trump. (And, really, can’t Politico do better than “former running mate”?) Pence, having himself been subpoenaed by the January 6 Entertainment Committee (he doesn’t plan to testify) is nervous about his role in that jamboree.

Two of the week’s biggest news stories are unfolding in hermetically sealed chambers. The left half of the country, and the international press, is aghast at the criminal referrals from the January 6 Committee, while the right ignores the panel’s findings as a foregone conclusion, part of a witch hunt against Donald Trump.

In two weeks, with great sorrow, our nation will mark the second anniversary of the culmination of an unprecedented self-coup attempt by a sitting president: the January 6 Capitol riot, which resulted in five deaths. The callous barbarism we witnessed that day was nothing less than a brazen assault on the fountainhead of American self-governance, the Constitution. No amount of Tucker Carlson’s documentaries or Revolver News clickbait can change that inconvenient fact. Conservatives who dismiss what happened as nothing more than a false flag operation designed to initiate a “patriot purge” are doing themselves a grave disservice. Since July of last year, the January 6 Committee has been charged with investigating the events of the fateful day and what precipitated it.

The Select Committee to Investigate January 6 announced Monday that it would refer former president Donald Trump for charges to the Department of Justice’s special counsel. The committee also released its Executive Summary, which includes a description of findings and charges. Since its formation in July 2021, the committee has heard testimony from dozens of officials in the Trump administration and individuals who were associated with the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol. The Executive Summary lists seventeen findings of the Select Committee which inform their decision to refer Trump for charges.

Tabloid conservatism is the felicitous phrase that Sam Tanenhaus, one of our most astute analysts of the modern right, gave to the approach that Donald Trump, who faces various possible indictments, and Steve Bannon, who has just been sentenced to four months in prison and a measly $6,500 fine for failing to testify before Congress’s January 6 Committee, concocted as an alternative to the stuffy establishment mode that had prevailed in the GOP. A self-proclaimed populist, Bannon turned the website Breitbart.com into a juggernaut on the right and propelled the Trump campaign to victory. Absent his hard-edged approach, which included bringing various former Bill Clinton inamoratas to a debate with Hillary, it seems doubtful that Trump would have won in 2016.

I take a page from history. On Thursday, the Committee (you know which one) voted 9-0 to subpoena the former president. Of course, he might refuse to comply with the subpoena. What then? Here’s one scenario, per CNN: "Contempt. The full House, which is controlled by Democrats until at least January, could vote to hold him in contempt of Congress, something it’s done with several other uncooperative witnesses "Referral. After a contempt of Congress referral, the Justice Department could then prosecute, as it did with Trump’s former aide Steve Bannon and plans to do with his once economic advisor Peter Navarro "Prosecution. If found guilty, as Bannon was, Trump could theoretically face a minimum of thirty days in jail.

Cockburn can't help but chuckle. Last night, the January 6 committee showed video of Senator Josh Hawley running from Capitol rioters, mere hours after he'd infamously given them the thumbs-up. Twitter, in its comedic wisdom, pounced all over the footage, and here's the best of of what one particularly resourceful user, @The_Mal_Gallery, came up with. https://twitter.com/The_Mal_Gallery/status/1550290085882564608?s=20&t=YlAB-XpczT1TiCzbDPmAOQ  https://twitter.com/The_Mal_Gallery/status/1550297459943002112 https://twitter.

Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent. For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding.

The January 6 Committee geared up to deliver a potential bombshell on Tuesday with emergency testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to chief of staff Mark Meadows. But like most of the attempts to take down former president Donald Trump — from Russian collusion hoaxes to slimy porn lawyers — Hutchinson's testimony quickly revealed itself as too good to be true. It quickly became clear that one of Hutchinson's most shocking claims was either misremembered or an outright lie. She claimed that Tony Ornato, White House deputy chief of staff for operations, and Bobby Engel, who headed Trump's security detail, told her that Trump had attempted to grab the steering wheel of a Secret Service vehicle to redirect it to the Capitol on January 6.

In one of its most desperate moves yet, the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is considering subpoenaing Ginni Thomas, wife of Clarence Thomas. The Committee wants to review a handful of texts Ginni sent about the Capitol riot, which they feel may influence her husband’s decisions from the bench. The connection is weak, along the lines of Trump being the one who actually slapped Chris Rock. But the need to come up with a new crisis to return attention to the events of January 6 post-Ukraine is real. The genesis of this "crisis" begins with the Hail Mary plans to use the January 6 Committee to rescue Democrats from near-certain midterm electoral defeat.

The idea that what happened at the Capitol of January 6 was an “insurrection” was always a ridiculous and malevolent exaggeration. The passage of time has exposed that politically motivated lie and sent the rats scurrying for alternative explanations. Right on cue, we find a hobbyhorse leftist taking to the pages of the Washington Post — Jeff Bezos’s onshore publicity organ for the Democratic Party — to warn us against calling the protest at the Capitol an “insurrection.” The memo to Scribes and Pharisees has gone out. It’s no longer an “insurrection.” It’s been rebaptized a “sinister” act of “vigilantism.

Last night was Liz Cheney’s breakout moment. As Cheney read the various text messages from various Fox News luminaries and Donald Trump Jr. to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she milked the moment, lingering over memorable phrases such as "he’s got to condemn this shit ASAP." And yet Sonny boy's plea was ignored. The old man reveled in the feculent mayhem. Once seen as a neoconservative ogress, Cheney has now achieved full redemption, morphing into the darling of the mainstream media for her refusal to dismiss the mob on January 6 as a bunch of tourists who had accidentally strayed into the Capitol. This is Cheney’s High Noon.