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2020 Election Fallout Part 16: Public Hearings Are Underway


GreyhoundFan

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Holy moly, Liz Cheney just said that during today's hearing they are going to name names: which congresspeople asked for pardons...

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10 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Holy moly, Liz Cheney just said that during today's hearing they are going to name names: which congresspeople asked for pardons...

I missed that part, I only switched on at about 9.15 CEST …

Is it just me or is Adam Kinzinger smirking a little? I like to think it’s a „screw you other republicans, I’m doing this and I’m gonna do it good“ smirk.

ETA: yeah I’m not just imagining this, he’s directly addressing „his fellow republicans“ now, essentially saying „you’re going to see how dangerous that coup was today“ - bless him, he still thinks the other congressional R-s will accept evidence and logic …

Also I realised just now that I’d all but forgotten that Sessions was AG once … orange guy had such a personnel turnover, hard to keep track of all …

Edited by Shrubbery
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And the naming of names has begun...  in showing video after video of them spouting the big lie.

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5 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

And the naming of names has begun...  in showing video after video of them spouting the big lie.

And it was more or less a R-Show of famous horrors… I surely don’t know very many US Congress members, but I recognised all of those as particularly nasty … that is partly thanks to these forums here 😂

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Gosh Matt Gaetz reminds me of the villain in „The Incredibles“.

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"What Trump’s anger at Kevin McCarthy really says about Jan. 6"

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With the Jan. 6 House select committee hearings continuing to dominate the news, Republicans are growing increasingly uneasy as they watch damning revelations pour forth about Donald Trump’s extraordinary corruption and mounting exposure to potential criminality.

And they’ve decided their problem isn’t Donald Trump.

It’s Kevin McCarthy.

In recent days, Trump has angrily criticized the House minority leader and California Republican for botching GOP strategy toward the hearings. This has emboldened GOP lawmakers to vocally criticize McCarthy, mainly over his early decision to pull all of his GOP choices from the committee.

But there’s a hidden baloney factor to this story that shouldn’t slide by without challenge. Republicans are claiming McCarthy’s misstep has deprived them of the chance to challenge the committee’s revelations and mount an effective defense of Trump.

Yet this claim is itself a pernicious form of spin. It’s meant to imply that the story the committee is telling is somehow one-sided, that there exists an alternate set of facts being suppressed by Democrats, one that would weaken the revelatory force of what we’re learning about Trump and his co-conspirators.

What’s really irritating Republicans is that they’ve been deprived of the opportunity to pollute the media environment and muddy up the harsh truths coming to light with obfuscation, misdirection and lies.

This becomes obvious if you read what Trump and Republicans are actually saying. The second-guessing of McCarthy is becoming big news — see here, here and here — and the stories all note that Trump’s anger at McCarthy is increasingly shared by GOP lawmakers.

“It was a bad decision not to have representation on that committee,” Trump said this week. He also raged that the committee’s “biased and hateful” witnesses are indicting him “without even the slightest cross examination.” He added: “Republicans should be allowed representation!!!”

After House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) nixed two of McCarthy’s choices for the committee last summer — they were Trumpist arsonists plainly bent on sabotage — McCarthy yanked his remaining three choices, even though Pelosi approved them. That left Pelosi’s choices of Reps. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) as the only two Republicans.

Egged on by Trump’s frustration, some Trump-allied Republicans argue that McCarthy should have left those three on the committee. One Republican says they could have “defended the hell” out of Trump, making for a “totally different debate.” Some privately complain Republicans have no insight into the committee’s internal workings.

It’s darkly amusing that Republicans see McCarthy as their problem here, amid new evidence that Trump pressured his vice president to illegally subvert a U.S. election, weaponized a visibly violent mob toward that end, pushed many government officials to engage in extraordinary corruption and incited supporters to terrorize election workers.

But in a way, this hints at the deeper truth about the whole affair. Many — or even most — Republicans have simply ruled out the option of grappling straightforwardly with what Trump did. So their only response is to suggest that the force of these revelations derives from the GOP failure to counter them factually and procedurally.

But this is just more deception. All it really means is that, had they been on the committee, they would have tried to clutter those revelations up with endless gaslighting.

If Trump-allied Republicans were on the panel, what would they have said and done? Trump wants “representation,” and Republicans say they would have “defended” him. But what does this really mean?

Would they have said Trump wasn’t actually informed that the scheme he was pressing for was illegal? That he really believed he had won in 2020? That he didn’t know the mob was violent before pointing it like a howitzer at his vice president? That he actually believed exactly enough ballots could be “found” in Georgia to allow him to prevail by precisely one vote?

Here’s a better guess: Because the case against Trump on those fronts is so strong, Republicans on the committee wouldn’t have even tried to “defend” him against it. Instead, they would have engaged in endless obfuscating antics.

We know this, because they’re essentially telling us so. One Republican now says that if he were on the committee, he’d make a big issue out of Pelosi’s supposed security failures at the Capitol, which is just rank misdirection and utter nonsense.

Meanwhile, the lament that Republicans lack insight into the committee’s inner workings is just another way of saying they’d engage in procedural sabotage, such as claiming Democrats are distorting or suppressing witness testimony, a trick Trump allies have used before.

When you watch a witness such as the Republican state House speaker in Arizona testify about Trump’s corruption, you can be certain Republicans don’t actually want to “cross examine” such figures in any meaningful sense, or genuinely believe it would be helpful to Trump.

If you doubt this, remember: We were told before the hearings that Trump allies would “counter-program” them. Yet they’ve been largely silent. If there were a genuine fact-based defense available to them, we’d be hearing it.

Everyone is entitled to a defense, of course. But we are not required to pretend there is an alternate, possibly exonerating set of facts that is being suppressed when there isn’t one.

The very suggestion is itself more gaslighting. And because news accounts don’t state this plainly, coverage of Trump/GOP criticism of McCarthy unwittingly advances GOP spin about this supposed alternate story that isn’t being told.

 

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6 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

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I hope he doesn‘t support any of Trump‘s minions (Ron DeSantis comes to mind) running for the GOP primary either. If Don Bacon supports one of those people his statement above isn‘t worth the paper it‘s written on.

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"The subtle stagecraft behind the Jan. 6 hearings"

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Bill Stepien’s wife went into labor, and suddenly democracy hung in the balance.

Or at least that’s how it may have seemed on Monday morning of last week for the members and staff of the House select committee probing the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, who had been awaiting the former Trump campaign manager’s arrival for his televised testimony that day.

Timing is everything for the select committee, which is attempting to turn a year-long investigative grind into something like must-see television, spread out over at least a half-dozen live-broadcast hearings — though some conservative critics see it as more of a televised prosecution. To tell the complicated story of how Donald Trump and his allies tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election means finding a coherent narrative and breaking it down into chapters, with witnesses rolled out in a careful and deliberate chronology. Committee members had counted on using the testimony of Stepien, who had never spoken publicly about the days after the election, to build their Chapter Two — how Trump ignored the warnings of close advisers that there was no credible evidence of widespread fraud to support his flagrant claims of a stolen election.

But just hours before Stepien was expected to testify, word reached the committee that he wouldn’t make it to Capitol Hill — his wife was about to have a baby.

Committee investigators rushed to the small room in the Cannon House Office Building where they have huddled during the hearings with a small production team. They were joined by a man in horn-rimmed glasses and a dark-blue plaid suit. He was James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, whom the committee tapped this spring, relatively late in their process, to help hone a clean, compelling, easy-to-follow structure to present the evidence they’ve collected from more than 1,000 interviews and depositions.

The committee announced that the day’s hearing would start late — and its staff got to work filling the programming void. An idea to have Stepien’s attorney deliver a statement on his behalf was considered and rejected; instead investigators decided to simply present excerpts of Stepien’s videotaped deposition — a compelling-enough story, as it turned out, with the campaign pro describing his dismay as Trump shunned his advice in favor of the wild election-fraud theories whispered to him by Rudy Giuliani and others.

“I didn’t think what was happening was necessarily honest or professional at that point in time,” Stepien said in one clip widely cited in news coverage across the country.

The four hearings that have been broadcast so far — a fifth is scheduled for Thursday afternoon — have been stately affairs, lacking the bombast and grandstanding that dominate most American political performance these days. The witnesses selected to appear live are polite and noncontentious. Some observers, including Trump defenders, have criticized the lack of vigorous cross-examination — GOP leaders opposed the committee’s creation and declined to join it, leaving a mostly Democratic panel — leading to a format that subverts the bipartisan standards of traditional hearings but also eliminates some of the usual TV-friendly fireworks.

Yet a subtle stagecraft has lent the hearings an unexpected momentum and pull that has drawn in many viewers — including the former president, who is said to have been monitoring them. The committee has shown shocking, never-before-seen video of Jan. 6 violence. There have been emotional climaxes, such as the tearful testimony of a Georgia poll worker who said she was forced to go into hiding after Trump’s allies baselessly accused her of rigging the vote; and jolts of unbleeped vulgarity, including former Attorney General William P. Barr in a video deposition testifying that he told Trump his claims of election fraud were “bulls---.”

Committee members have even deployed some of the tropes of episodic drama to help viewers follow the intricate storyline — flashbacks, flash-forwards, repetition of key scenes, even previews of coming attractions.

“Let me leave you today with one clip to preview what you will see in one of our hearings to come,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said at the close of Day Two.

The tantalizing 15-second snippet of deposition that followed — White House lawyer Eric Herschmann relaying a testy conversation with Trump legal adviser John Eastman (“I said to him, are you out of your effing mind?”) — hit the news cycle like a cherry bomb, sparking a cascade of anticipatory punditry and analysis.

“That’s all her,” a person involved in the hearings said, crediting Cheney with the tactic. “And she’s pretty formidable at it.”

Though the hearings are not as popular as presidential debates, which can draw 60 to 75 million viewers when simulcast by all the major networks, they are getting far higher ratings than most other congressional hearings, according to Nielsen. Nearly 19 million watched the first prime-time hearing through major broadcast channels on June 9 — a viewership roughly on par with Sunday Night Football — while about 11 million watched the first daytime hearing last week.

When preparing to launch the televised hearings, the committee hoped to find a more coherent way to present its findings than what the public saw in the Trump impeachment proceedings or former special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s testimony before Congress about his investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Even before the committee brought in Goldston — a move that drew vociferous blowback from Republican leaders — its members had begun to sort their copious interview and video evidence into specific themes and along specific timelines that would allow them to emphasize certain points.

Among the issues they wanted to highlight: What happened on Jan. 6 at the Capitol. What happened in the meetings on Jan. 3 when Trump nearly installed a new attorney general in a bid to overturn the election results. What happened when Trump heard that the mob at the Capitol was threatening to hang Mike Pence. What happened when Trump launched a pressure campaign in Georgia and other key states to overturn the results. And how Trump’s allies have continued to promote baseless election-fraud claims in an attempt to exert control over future races — a slow-rolling insurrection, as committee members see it.

The sheer amount of evidence collected over the past year — emails, texts, thousands of hours of videotaped deposition interviews and film footage from the Jan. 6 attack — with more coming in every day, has been both a boon and a challenge.

Goldston suggested using snippets of deposition videos to recreate particular moments, almost like an oral history. “We almost stumbled into it,” said another person familiar with the committee’s internal deliberations. “We realized we had interviewed everyone in a particular meeting, and could just tell it through their voices.”

To lend clarity to other complicated events, the committee has turned to its own staff investigators to act as narrators — such as lawyer Marcus Childress, who appeared during the first hearing to describe how Trump’s tweets encouraging people to attend the “Stop the Steal” rally were amplified and echoed by far-right extremists on the internet.

With the committee still receiving fresh evidence — just this week, they subpoenaed a British documentary filmmaker who has never-seen footage of Trump from the final weeks of the 2020 campaign — the content and timing of the hearings have remained in constant flux, requiring committee members to pivot on real-time deadlines.

Goldston told colleagues that the shake-up prompted by Stepien’s absence last week was no different than producing a breaking-news special that has to be edited on the fly. It helped that the committee had hours of Stepien’s deposition interview on hand anyway, in case he delivered live testimony that conflicted with what he had told them previously.

But the committee has intentionally resisted jazzing up its video segments with the trappings of a slick, overly dramatized broadcast-news package.

While lawmakers fretted privately ahead of the hearings that Goldston’s presentation was lackluster, “it ended up hanging together so cohesively and so right,” said a person involved in the process, “and we haven’t overplayed anything.”

Some of Trump’s allies, who testified reluctantly under subpoena, have expressed a grudging admiration of the production values. “Game respects game,” one figure interviewed by the committee told The Post. The drama of the televised candor spilling out under oath from inner-circle figures like Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Jason Miller, Stepien and Barr has frustrated the former president, according to two of his advisers. He has complained that so many people cooperated on camera, they said. Some of his allies who have testified on camera have tried to convince Trump that they are victims of unflattering editing by the committee, according to a person who spoke with Trump.

For its final hearing, which will be on an as-yet-undetermined date in July, the committee is expected to turn again to testimony from family members on camera along with that of other close aides to focus on the then-president’s actions during the 187 minutes that the Capitol was under siege.

 

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Here come the pardon requests:

Mo Brooks . . . Matt Gaetz . . .

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"The Jan. 6 hearings and the spectacle of competence"

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Every day, from the left and the right and all corners of America, there are reminders that the government is broken. Stagnant, inadequate, wasteful, useless. Whether the issues we face are urgent and emotional (school shootings) or slow but existential (climate change), the extreme polarization and contortionate priorities of our political system, especially on the national level, feel practically designed to discourage hope and change.

Then, a reprieve. The televised Jan. 6 hearings — the fifth of which will air Thursday, followed by at least two more sessions next month — have offered a rare glimpse of administrative credibility, a spectacle of civic competence. America doesn’t have to be a post-truth dumpster fire sinking into largely self-inflicted imperial decline, imply the hearings, which are led by Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). The values and attributes we want from our leaders — intelligence and empathy in service of integrity, efficacy and bipartisanship — have been on ample display, modeling a version of Congress we want to see, as well as one that may disappear with this year’s midterms.

The nine-member House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, whose only other GOP member is Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), has persuasively contended that former president Donald Trump, despite being surrounded by advisers who told him he’d lost the 2020 election, attempted to stay in power by mobilizing his supporters that day with the “big lie.” What’s most notable about the hearings’ rhetorical style is their prosecutorial orderliness; the committee has an ambitious, multifaceted case to make and has been arguing it boldly and methodically.

In stark contrast to so many congressional hearings over the years — events that politicians have routinely treated as opportunities to unsettle witnesses or grandstand for the cameras — this weeks-long presentation is clearly a cooperative project, with interrogators and respondents working in tandem. Skeptics might point to the collaboration between the politicians and the panelists as a reason to dismiss the proceedings, except that the highest-profile witnesses to date have been Republicans. (The vast majority of the GOP leadership declined to participate.)

As The Washington Post’s television critic, the question I’m supposed to be answering is: Are the Jan. 6 hearings “good TV”? Who cares? What’s vastly more interesting is how the hearings illustrate all that you gain when you eschew the usual elements of politics-as-entertainment as typified by Trump: conflict, chaos, mockery of the institutions legislators are supposed to uphold.

But these sessions certainly haven’t been boring. In fact, they’ve been surprising and poignant, especially in the descriptions from people on the ground of what they’ve endured. The hearings have given us turns of phrase and firsthand accounts that should define the insurrection and the repercussions of the “big lie” on ordinary folk: Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards “slipping in people’s blood” while trying to quell the riots, for example, or mother-daughter election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss forced into reclusive isolation after Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani spread false claims about their supposed ballot tampering. One threat sent to Moss, who is Black, read, “Be glad it’s 2020 and not 1920.”

Where there has been tension in the hearings, it’s often been between principles and partisanship. Amid nonstop media focus on the GOP’s rightward tack, which has resulted in a purging of ostensible RINOs (an acronym favored by Trump that means “Republicans in Name Only”), the sessions have stood out for bringing to the foreground a specimen we don’t see covered much anymore: conservatives who care more about the rule of law than loyalty to the party. (Their heyday might have been back in the ’90s, when their fictional counterparts were intoning solemnities on “The West Wing.”) In a memorably acerbic line, Cheney challenged members of her party to think beyond this craven moment: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

The committee has broken down into seven components Trump’s perpetuation of the “big lie” — a defiantly complex stand against our too-often meme-based political discourse. The hearings have encompassed not only Trump’s efforts to thwart the will of the people and his incitement of homicidal violence that narrowly missed his own vice president, but also his attempts to corrupt the Justice Department and state officials in battleground states. In describing the months-long attacks on our democracy in a manner so diametrically opposed to Trump’s proudly impromptu oratory, the committee silently asked its audience: Which America do you prefer, a volatile (if fitfully entertaining) mess, or law and order?

It cannot be denied that, as television, the hearings have been a masterful production that’s taken to heart the entertainment industry’s hard-won lessons. Scheduled during a programming lull in the summer, the presentations have enjoyed robust media coverage, and the spread over multiple weeks has allowed the revelations and stories to propagate and sink in. (Had the sessions spanned only a week, they might’ve been forgotten already, not unlike a season on Netflix binged in a single day and quickly turned into half a memory.) The judiciously edited clips of depositions have been maximized for viral circulation, and the montages of Trump advisers agreeing with each other in quick succession in opposition to the “big lie” make it increasingly clear that the former president has chosen to seclude himself with yes men up for the indignity of sustaining his delusion.

Anyone who’s sat through an inept or awkward corporate presentation at work can attest that the Jan. 6 hearings are not that. If the sessions have been deliberately paced, they’ve been slick, too, with previews and “cliffhangers” bookending the “episodes” and very few noticeable gaps between, say, the end of a sentence and the start of a video. Thus far, there have been two kinds of production hiccups, both outside the committee’s control: the withdrawing of Trump’s former campaign manager Bill Stepien from the witness panel after his wife went into labor and the delay of some hearings. The committee worked around Stepien’s absence seamlessly by using excerpts from previous interviews. As for the delays, they’ve signaled that the members’ main concern is the thoroughness of their case to the American public. “We’ve taken in some additional information that’s going to require additional work,” Thompson said Wednesday. “So rather than present hearings that have not been the quality of the hearings in the past, we made a decision to just move into sometime in July.”

The hearings’ spectacle of competence — of authority and accountability, and the reassertion of truth in a multi-reality country — can’t help but soothe. The people in charge are getting to the bottom of what happened, contextualizing it in the nation’s history and applauding the individuals who held their own against an onslaught of lies, absurdity and unimaginable pressure. (At least for as long as they could: Neither Moss nor Freeman work as election workers anymore, nor do any of their former Fulton County colleagues.)

But the committee’s mission isn’t to uplift, but to warn. At the end of the third session, conservative judge Michael Luttig cautioned that “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy,” not because of what they did, but because of what they say they will do. Where they failed in 2020, he exhorted, they may succeed in 2024.

Near-misses are narratively hard to get invested in. Just look at the dozens of white nationalists caught with riot gear inside a U-Haul less than an eighth of a mile from a Pride event just 10 days ago — and how quickly they vanished from the national consciousness. For all the damage it caused, the coup on Jan. 6 almost happened, which may be why, as dominant as the hearings have been in the headlines, their disclosures are still being ignored by large swaths of the nation, including the third of the country that believes in the “big lie.”

Unfortunately, the hearings’ appealing vision of bipartisanship is a temporary one, as Kinzinger has announced he won’t seek reelection and Cheney has been disavowed by her own state’s party. But the committee members are still doing their meticulous best to convince the public of the scope, intricacy and ethical bottomlessness of Trump’s plot — and in doing so, exemplifying how government should work every day. There’s plenty to admire about the competence on display. But it would be counter to the committee’s aims to be reassured by it.

 

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Oh now the names are being named!!

Listing what names I can catch:

Gaetz, Brooks, unnamed representatives who’d voted against certification, Biggs, Gohmert, Perry …

Jordan asked about pardons but not for one.

MTG didn’t ask.

Gaetz is being named most often.

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"Trump called Jan. 6 participants ‘smart,’ filmmaker says"

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Former president Donald Trump called those who participated in the demonstrations and Capitol attack on Jan. 6, 2021, “smart” during a defiant interview last spring, according to a documentary filmmaker who was granted extensive access to Trump and his family and is now cooperating with the House committee investigating the insurrection.

“A very small portion as you know went down to the Capitol, and then a very small portion of them went in. But I will tell you, they were angry from the standpoint of what happened in the election because they’re smart, and they see. And they saw what happened. I believe that that was a big part of what happened on Jan. 6,” he said to British filmmaker Alex Holder in a March interview, according to a film clip reviewed by The Washington Post.

Trump said it was a “sad day” but did not offer a repudiation of the events, according to the footage reviewed by The Post and to the filmmaker.

Holder met with Jan. 6 committee investigators in a closed-door meeting Thursday and provided more than 10 hours of footage to the panel from interviews with Trump, his adult children, former vice president Mike Pence and footage of the Capitol attack itself. Holder said he was surprised he had not been called sooner but received a subpoena last week from the committee.

Holder was interviewed for about two hours but declined to specify what the committee staff asked him “out of respect for an ongoing investigation,” his spokeswoman said.

Holder said he interviewed Trump three times in December 2020, March 2021 and May 2021 for the documentary, called “Unprecedented” and slated to be released this summer. The film has been bought by Discovery Plus, a representative for the company said.

The film was meant to chronicle Trump’s reelection campaign and his relationship with his adult children, he said. Holder said he was not present for any of the planning of the Jan. 6 events and did not have private details about its provenance.

In his December interview, which lasted 45 minutes at the Diplomatic Reception Room in the White House, the filmmaker said Trump was in a foul mood and was obsessed with the 2020 election, looking for ways to stay in office and talking about how he needed to pressure Georgia officials and the Supreme Court. “He had barricaded himself in the White House,” he said. “He wasn’t talking to the press or doing anything. … He said, we have to get some good judges who can help us.”

The documentary filmmaker said Trump never conceded he lost the election — and repeated his same claims of fraud and protestations that he won the election in private as he did in public. Trump also did not raise the date of Jan. 6 with him in his first meeting, and the president’s children and Pence similarly never mentioned the date before the attack happened, he said.

In March at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in South Florida, Holder said Trump was defiant and did not accept any responsibility for Jan. 6 and remained obsessed with the election, even moving the discussion away from softer questions about his family. He talked extensively about his crowd size that day, bragging it was the biggest crowd he had ever attracted.

“I would bring up other topics like his children, and he would talk about that, but he always wanted to come back to the election,” Holder said.

A spokesman for Trump did not comment.

Holder said Trump’s children praised their father for waging a battle over the election in December interviews. “They really echoed their father,” he said. “You could tell they really admired their father.”

After Jan. 6, he said the Trump family declined to talk about the topic at all, as did Pence, who sat for an interview with the documentarian a few days after Jan. 6. “And we will make that clear in the film,” he said. A person familiar with the project said it was not pitched as a project about Jan. 6 but instead about the Trump family and Trump as a father.

Holder said he was present as Pence received an email about the 25th Amendment to the Constitution — which lays out procedures for removing a president from office — but he declined to describe Pence’s reaction.

“He didn’t seem mad,” Holder said. “The people around him were nervous. He told us he wasn’t as good of a golfer as Trump. He seemed optimistic about the future of America.”

Holder said that he believed the committee would be interested in six hours of footage he shot Jan. 6, when he was not at the White House but with the rioters on Capitol Hill. He was not with Trump or Pence that day, he said.

Holder said the family wanted to participate in the documentary as a “legacy project” and that he chatted with family members before the election but with Trump only after the election. He had gotten to know associates of the family, Holder said, through a project he was shooting in the Middle East. A person familiar with the matter said he was introduced to the Trump family by Jason Greenblatt, a Middle East envoy in the Trump administration.

“They all thought they were going to win,” he said.

He was given access to Air Force One, the White House and campaign events, he said, and some in his crew were closer in proximity to Trump at times “than his own Secret Service agents.”

Multiple campaign officials said they had no idea Holder was filming a documentary. “I think there was no question the family did sort of keep us away from the campaign. We had some interaction with them but not a lot,” he said.

The documentarian said Trump never conceded in private that he had lost. “I had the opinion prior to meeting him that he actually didn’t really believe that the election was rigged,” he said. “Absolutely not. He is absolutely convinced.”

He also said that in the final interview, the filmmaker was finally able to get Trump to talk about his children and topics other than the election. Trump railed about getting kicked off social media.

“I showed him on my iPad a clip of his kids campaigning for him — it was a really interesting moment. He said, ‘They all have their own base, but it’s really part of my base,’” Holder said. “There were elements of him being proud of his kids.”

He said Trump also expressed a surprising amount of honesty over his coronavirus diagnosis. “He expressed being scared over covid, and how he was sick, and how he had friends who died,” Holder said.

 

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I think the committee are name-dropping Gaetz just like they started name-dropping Eastman, to prepare for there being more to come. (Wouldn’t it be lovely if they went after Gaetz hardcore?)

how long until the orange one says he barely ever knew Gaetz? 

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2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

Holy moly, Liz Cheney just said that during today's hearing they are going to name names: which congresspeople asked for pardons...

It's happening THIS SECOND.  Gaetz, Brooks, Biggs, Gohmert, Perry, Taylor Greene.

Jeffrey Clark was basically incinerated, not in direct testimony, but in testimony about the meeting where he was being discussed as a sudden replacement for Rosen and it was made clear he would be a total incompetent running DoJ, everyone would resign in protest, and no one at the FBI would follow his orders.  I'm not sure anyone's ego can withstand that. Now Kinzinger is excoriating him as Trump's boot licking lickspittle lap dog. 

Kinzinger is closing and is incredibly inspirational, like mind blowing.  Liz is on now. 

7 minutes ago, Shrubbery said:

MTG didn’t ask.

MTG addressed her pardon request through WH counsel (I think), but did not directly query the aide who was testifying. 

Edited by Howl
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4 minutes ago, Howl said:

MTG addressed her pardon request through WH counsel (I think), but did not directly query the aide who was testifying. 

I was wondering about that (Marge giving the impression of a total pardon hogger) but I was just jotting down what the witnesses said, in case there were a really big reveal.

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I am so impressed with how well the committee and those who are within with them have put together this investigation and presentation. It really is a shame Adam Kinzinger is one and done. He’s shown real moral fortitude and he appears to be one of the few who would reach across the aisle on issues. He will be treated well by the history books but it’s horrible that he (and Liz Cheney) are being ostracized for having the backbone to refuse to allow the attempt to overthrow our government go unchecked. 

Thank you all who are providing updates. I have mostly been unable to listen live so I have to get my information from the news. Your posts as things happen have been fantastic as I am able to take a couple of minutes here and there to catch up. 

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"Rep. Brooks agrees to testify before Jan. 6 committee but with conditions"

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Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) agreed to testify before the Jan. 6 committee but only under a set of conditions.

Brooks, in a statement sent to reporters as Thursday’s hearing unfolded, said he had his “reservations” about the committee but that he would “voluntarily submit” to a deposition if five requirements are met.

Brooks, who during Thursday’s hearing was said by White House aides to be one of the House Republicans who asked for a presidential pardon, is requiring the deposition be public and that questions be “relevant to, and limited to, events surrounding” the insurrection.

The Republican also requested that questions be only asked by the members of Congress on the committee. If the committee is going to “ask questions” about content found in statements and electronic or written communications, he wants these documents to be turned in to his office “a minimum” of seven days before the deposition, so Brooks “can refresh his memory.”

Finally, Brooks is demanding that the deposition be conducted on a day on which the House is voting, so that he is already physically present in Washington.

“Quite frankly, I don’t believe I have knowledge of January 6 events that are not already known or that add to what the Committee already knows,” the congressman said in his statement. “I will voluntarily appear before the Committee to give sworn testimony providing the five requirements mentioned above are met.”

 

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I only heard the end of today's hearing (more medical errands with Mom), and need to go back and listen from the beginning. Thanks for the posts.

When Trump was first elected, I thought he'd just be a figurehead, and hoped that those using him as their puppet were not as evil as he is. Throughout his presidency, I kept thinking "Aren't there people telling him that's not how any of this works?" Because usually it seemed like there weren't. But it is good to find out that there were a few who resisted him, at least at the end.

Wouldn't it be nice if all of the dipshits who blindly followed Trump now decided that "the cool kids" are all testifying and dissing Donald and being honest (well, that may be a bridge too far), and joined in?

Also, in the "surface things that shouldn't matter but that I notice" department, I love Representative Bennie Thompson's voice and accent.

I especially love the way he says "Dah-uld Trump," with no "n" in the first name. I know it's just his accent (maybe Mississippians drop "n" like Philadelphians drop "d" and "t" in the middle of a word), but it sounds so deliciously disrespectful of The Dah-uld.

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Neal Katyal on a panel with Nicole Wallace and Ari Melber discussing today's hearing:  Katyal noted what an amazing job Rosen, Donahue, et al. did today with their testimony,  but WHERE WERE THEY DURING the 2nd IMPEACHMENT?  They knew what had happened, what Trump had attempted and how incredibly wrong and illegal it was.  They knew then that Trump was desperate to steal the election and stay in power.  But nope, not a peep during the impeachment. 

So yes, they get credit for their forthright testimony for the Jan 6th Committee and the American people today,  but they failed utterly in their obligations to the American people during Trump's 2nd impeachment. 

ETA: Elie Mystal is on Joy Reid excoriating these guys (Rosen, Donahugh, et al.) for not standing up IN REAL TIME because, as noted, they knew what Trump was trying to do with Jeffrey Clark was wrong.  What Mystal sees, rather than stand-up guys testifying today, are a bunch of lawyer guys trying to protect their collective asses from criminal exposure. 

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It seems to be a theme in the media to constantly point out that the witnesses never spoke out in real time. Which is true.

However, I don’t think they should be pointing at this as much as they are. It diminishes their testimony, which, belated as it is, is still vitally important.

It’s not about the witnesses, it’s about what they say. And their stories are damning. They show the true nature of the Trump administration and the lengths it was willing to go to in order to remain in power. They show the true nature of Trump, and his desperate attempts to turn around his election loss. They show how utterly unfit for office he is. They show who aided and abetted Trump in his attempts. And best of all, they lay bare the utter corruption of the Magats within the Republican Party.

Staunch Trump supporters are beginning to have their doubts about Trump, and are finding out things they never knew before. And some are turning away.

That is the ‘breaking news’ everyone should be trumpeting about. Anything else diminishes this effect. 

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Heather Cox Richardson has a good summary on her substack. At the hearing I was infuriated Clark pleaded the fifth when the investigators questioned him. I didn't know this tough (quote from the link above):

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When interviewed about the letter, Clark repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and invoked executive privilege. Yesterday, federal investigators executed a search warrant on Clark’s home in suburban Virginia. They seized his electronic devices. 

 

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5 hours ago, fraurosena said:

It seems to be a theme in the media to constantly point out that the witnesses never spoke out in real time. Which is true.

However, I don’t think they should be pointing at this as much as they are. It diminishes their testimony, which, belated as it is, is still vitally important.

First, I do get  your point, but I'm thinking that the criticism wouldn't be making its way to those who generally support Trump.   I saw it voiced on Ari Melber Show and the MSNBC media environment. No true Trumper would ever watch MSNBC. 

One person, maybe Nicole Wallace (can't remember), said that watching the testimony totally changed her mind about Trump's White House legal counsel. She had assumed that they were all incompetent flakes, while the reality is they were some very sharp lawyers who stood up to Trump at a pivotal moment when Trump was desperately seeking a way to overturn the election. 

On the other hand, it seemed to me to be a window into the brutal pecking order in DC.  Those WH lawyers were at the top of the heap, but also incredibly arrogant towards Clark, like,  We're the big dogs, he's a Chihuahua!  HOW DARE HE PRESUME TO OPERATE IN OUR SPHERE? Absolutely titanic egos. 

But then, how does that square with Trump snatching Bald Head Big Dick Toilet Salesman Matthew Whitaker (WIKI) possibly less competent than Clark, from (relative) obscurity and installing him as acting US Attorney General when Jeff Sessions got the boot?  Whitaker had been Jeff Sessions Chief of Staff, but still, he definitely wasn't ready for prime time. 

An interesting point made by several MSNBC commentators and guests had to do with the meeting in the Oval Office when Trump is trying to oust Rosen to ensconce Jeffrey Clark to overturn the election. Trump is trying to sort out, "Will Jeffrey Clark be the guy who can do what I need him to do" and the answer ultimately was no.  But it was a window into how Trump operated and made decisions. 

But Jeffrey Clark -- whoo boy. His home was ransacked by the Feds yesterday and today he woke up knowing he was utterly despised by WH legal counsel/Rosen and excoriated for incompetence yesterday in a hearing watched by millions of people. 

One little scumbag who made a brief appearance yesterday who I hope continues to slink off into oblivion is John McEntee.  He was awarded ridiculously important jobs at a very high level, based solely on his fealty to Trump and his mandate was to purge anyone not a Trump loyalist. 

 

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I saw part of a clip from Fox News last night.  Tucker was interviewing Jeff Clark.  Apparently, he asked to be able to put on his pants but the FBI said no and shuffled him out of his house.  They were in there, he said, for 3 1/2 hours and took all the electronics.  Clark was indignant and so, of course, was Tucker.  Me?  I'm elated.  The only thing better would be for the FBI to raid Tucker's house too.  

I'm a little surprised that Tucker had him on.  It looks like the Murdochs would know which way the wind is blowing by now.  They're still on the hook for the Dominion lawsuit which Rupert tried and failed to get dismissed.  The diehard fans won't abandon Trump but evidence is still piling up.  Trump is looking for fall guys and Eastman and Clark are just coffee boys to Trump.  How long will Fox let Tucker continue to be a Trump-fluffer?

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