Photo courtesy Random Lengths News
Donald Trump
This article was contributed to the Shepherd Express courtesy of Random Lengths News, a progressive media organization affiliated with the nationwide network of alternative newspapers.
As the House January 6 Committee prepared to release its final report, it’s become clearer than ever that the threat to American democracy is much bigger than former president Donald Trump, and will persist no matter what happens to him. Still, it’s crucially important that the committee made four criminal referrals to the Department of Justice for Trump: Obstruction of an Official Proceeding; Conspiracy to Defraud the United States; Conspiracy to Make a False Statement and “Incite,” “Assist” or “Aid and Comfort” an Insurrection. Attorney John Eastman—who provided a bogus legal theory that Trump relied on—was also referred to on the first three of them.
As committee member Jaime Raskin noted introducing the referrals, a U.S. federal judge has already ruled that Trump and Eastman “likely violated two criminal statutes. This is the starting point to our analysis today.”
In addition, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and three other GOP congress members were referred for sanction by the House Ethics Committee for failure to comply with subpoenas in the investigation.
The week before, Raskin, who also served as lead impeachment manager, explained his thinking in bringing charges:
We need to have clearly abundant evidence, evidence even more than sufficient evidence to believe that this crime was committed, we want to be identifying key players in the operation, we want to make sure nobody falls through the cracks, and we want to make sure that the crimes that we’re addressing have sufficient magnitude and gravity that the Congress of the United States needs to pronounce upon them.
More Charges Could Come
In addition to the charges referred to, the executive summary of the committee’s final report cites two conspiracy statutes that Trump could be charged with, depending on evidence developed by the Department of Justice. Convictions of Oathkeepers and others have already been obtained.
While Republicans have tried to either ignore or discredit the committee investigation, the overwhelming majority of witnesses—including all the central ones—were Republicans. The full list of witnesses called live or presented on video included 59 Republicans, one Democrat and 26 “others” including six police officers and eight insurrectionists. Here is a recap of what they have found.
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A Trail of Testimony
Beginning with its first hearing this year, on June 9—which provided an overview of everything to come—the committee showed that Trump was repeatedly told by his closest advisers that there was no fraud and that he lost. “I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff, which I told the president was bullshit,” Trump’s Attorney General Bill Barr said in a taped deposition. And Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, said that Barr’s statement “affected my perspective,” adding, “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he was saying.”
A parade of other witnesses from Trump’s administration and campaign made similar statements in depositions aired across various hearings, particularly the second hearing, on June 13, which made this a central focus. In particular, Barr said that he repeatedly told Trump “how crazy some of these allegations were,” that they were unfounded, but that there was “never an indication of interest in what the actual facts are.”
Taped testimony from Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told a similar story, pitting Stepien and other professionals on “Team Normal” vs. Rudy Giuliani, a seeming inexhaustible source of wild-eyed accusations. Two other witnesses shot down specific examples: U.S. Attorney B.J. Pak in Georgia, where Giuliani played a brief snippet of a security tape, falsely claiming it to be a ‘smoking gun’ proving voting fraud, and Al Schmidt, the only Republican member of Philadelphia’s three-member city commission, who rebuked Giuliani’s claim that 8,000 dead people had voted in Pennsylvania. “Not only was there not evidence of 8,000 dead voters voting in Pennsylvania, there wasn’t evidence of eight,” Schmidt told the committee.
He Knew He Lost
Eventually, in the Oct. 13 hearing, Cassidy Hutchinson, top aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s chief of staff, confirmed that Trump himself knew he’d lost. In her taped testimony she said, “The president said … something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark.”
The third hearing, on June 16, focused on the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to derail the process of counting the electoral votes. Multiple taped witnesses testified that Trump had repeatedly been told that this, too, had no merit, while two witnesses who advised Pence testified live: his former Pence attorney Greg Jacob and retired Republican judge J. Michael Luttig, perhaps the most esteemed conservative judge outside the Supreme Court.
“There was no support whatsoever in either the Constitution of the United States nor the laws of the United States” for what Trump was asking Pence to do, Luttig said, and he “would have laid my body across the road” before letting Pence illegally overturn the election.
The fourth hearing, on June 21, focused on Trump’s efforts to pressure GOP state officials to help overturn the election, featuring live testimony from three such officials: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, his deputy Gabe Sterling and Arizona House of Representatives Speaker Rusty Bowers.
“I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to,” Bowers testified. In addition to recounting these efforts and their resistance, there was also testimony about threats. Bowers was subject to intense vilification. On Saturdays, he said, “We have various groups come by and they have had video panel trucks with videos of me proclaiming me to be a pedophile and a pervert and a corrupt politician and blaring loudspeakers in my neighborhood and leaving literature both on my property, and—but arguing and threatening with neighbors and with myself,” including at least one incident with armed man vocally threatening a neighbor.
Find Me Some Votes!
As for Georgia, they played the tape of Trump’s call to Raffensperger saying, “So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have because we won the state.” And Raffensperger testified, “There were no votes to find. That was an accurate count that had been certified.”
The pressure on Raffensperger and Sterling is the subject of a criminal investigation by Fulton County DA Fani Willis, which could lead to state charges against Trump, regardless of any federal charges the Department of Justice might bring.
They also heard riveting testimony from Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss, two Black election workers who Trump repeatedly falsely attacked, and whose lives had been severely disrupted.
The fifth hearing, on June 23, focused on Trump’s far-flung efforts to strong-arm the DOJ into overturning the election, with live testimony from three key figures: Richard Donoghue, former acting U.S. deputy attorney general; Jeff Rosen, former acting attorney general; and Steven A. Engel, former assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel. They all testified that DOJ lawyers repeatedly told Trump he had the facts and the law wrong, but that he repeatedly tried all kinds of nutty gambits, including an effort to install an unqualified lawyer, Jeffrey Clark, to do his bidding. Only the threat of a mass resignation—reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” that turned public opinion against him—stopped Trump from appointing Clark.
Potential for Violence
The sixth hearing, on June 28, featured testimony from Cassidy Hutchinson, who provided damning evidence that Trump was not only aware of the potential for violence when he riled up his supporters in his public speech to them, but that he also wanted to lead them at the Capitol and physically assaulted his driver when the driver refused to take him there, because of security concerns. Trump knew there were armed crowd members being kept outside of where he was speaking because they couldn’t pass through the metal detectors (aka “mags”).
“I overheard the president say something to the effect of, you know, I – – I don’t effing care that they have weapons. They’re not here to hurt me,” Hutchinson testified. “Take those effing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in. Take the effing mags away.”She was told that later in the day by Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato (an account he initially disputed in press accounts but declined to dispute under oath). She’d also been told of Trump’s plans two days in advance by Guiliani.
The seventh hearing, July 12, focused on connections between Trump and the violent extremist groups who spearheaded the invasion of the Capitol (including Roger Stone’s role as a go-between), with live testimony from a former Oath Keepers spokesperson and a repentant participant in the riot, as well as an abundance of damning communications from Trump associates, extremists and others who bridged both worlds.
Breaking Point
The eighth hearing, July 23, concluded the live hearing series with a big-picture review overview adding new evidence about Trump’s failure to act during the riot, with live testimony from two former Trump aides who resigned over the attacks. Matthew Pottinger was deputy national security advisor to the president. Trump’s tweet attacking Mike Pence was the breaking point for him. “I was disturbed and worried to see that the president was attacking Vice President Pence for doing his constitutional duty. So the tweet looked to me like the opposite of what we really needed at that moment, which was a de-escalation. And that’s why I had said earlier that it looked like fuel being poured on the fire,” he said. “So that was the moment that I decided that I was going to resign.”
Finally, in their Oct. 13 business meeting, the committee summarized its ironclad case that Trump was responsible for the January 6 insurrection and added significant new information that had come to light since July. And it concluded by issuing a subpoena for Trump to testify, having made perfectly clear precisely what he has to answer for. But no one seriously expected Trump to respond.
Where Things Now Stand
Instead, Trump was out campaigning for his election-denying candidates. But their disastrous performance on Nov. 8, losing almost every high-profile race, has changed the tone of politics considerably. While Trump’s leadership of the party seems shakier than ever—reflected in a series of post-election polls — his most prominent potential challenger, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, is seeking to outflank him on the right by doubling down on anti-vax conspiracism.
“Most leading Republicans right now—from Mitch McConnell to Mike Pence to Ron DeSantis to Mike Pompeo—they actually want DOJ to get Donald Trump and they want the Jan. 6 Committee to get Donald Trump because they don’t have the courage to do it themselves,” former GOP Congressman David Jolly said on MSNBC on Saturday. “They want somebody else to knock out Donald Trump and clear the path for them and then pretend that none of this ever happened.”
The DOJ’s decision on whether to charge Trump will lie first with Special Counsel Jack Smith, a war crimes prosecutor appointed to his post by Attorney General Merrick Garland on Nov. 18. Smith is overseeing both the DOJ’s investigations of Trump-related to Jan. 6 as well as Trump’s theft and mishandling of over 11,000 government documents, some classified “top secret” or higher—a case that seemed to come out of nowhere with an Aug. 8 FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. The document case is seen as much more straightforward, which leads many to expect a decision on it first.
But failure to act on the January 6 coup attempt referrals would be seen by historians and other democracies as an invitation to another coup. It’s a pattern that’s been seen repeatedly since Germany in the 1920s and Japan in the 1930s. There’s no reason to think the U.S. is exempt.
