The Jan. 6 Case Against Donald Trump: Part 3.
The evidence is incontrovertible: Donald Trump was deeply involved in the plot to overthrow the government and keep himself in power.
Your primer for the House Select Committee’s hearings that begin June 9:
Part 1 of this series traced how Donald Trump prepared for his 2020 loss by saying the election would be rigged, then claimed the election had been stolen, then called his believers to Washington ("It will be wild") where they stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. It was a fraud on the American people. You’ll find Part 1 here.
Part 2 brought into the open the right-wing faction that in the months after the election plotted how to overthrow the government by aborting the certification of Joe Biden as president that was to take place in Congress that day. You’ll find Part 2 here.
Capture these links for the whole story.
Part 3: As the zero hour of January 6th approached, Trump lieutenants booked a suite of rooms at the luxurious Willard Hotel a block from the White House to make final plans for disrupting the certification of Joe Biden
as the nation's 46th president. Led by Trump's personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, once celebrated as "America's mayor" after 9/11, they called it their "command center". A number of principals in the scheme either stayed at the hotel or formed a steady stream of visitors.
Steve Bannon, formerly Trump's chief strategist in the White House, came and went, serving as the group's political adviser. Bernard Kerik, a former New York City police commissioner who was found to have accepted gifts from companies doing business with the city, did four years in federal prison, and was pardoned by Trump, had advanced $55,000 for the rooms. Of note, given the purpose of the rooms, was that no less than the Republican National Committee reimbursed him.
Also hunkered down was senior campaign aide and former White House special assistant Boris Epshteyn, and One America News reporter Christina Bobb, volunteering for the campaign, and showing along with Fox News's Sean Hannity that they saw no line separating journalism and political advocacy.
Enter John Eastman, a Federalist Society member, law professor, and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. On Christmas Eve, the Trump administration called, asking him to write a memo "asserting the vice president's power to hold up the certification" of the presidential election. Eastman submitted a two-page memo — later expanded — that laid out six steps by which Vice President Pence, in his other role as president of the Senate on January 6th, could halt the Electoral College count and go on to win for Trump a second term.
On January 4th, Trump met with Pence and Eastman in the Oval Office. Eastman told Pence that he had the constitutional authority to stop the certification process. Pence disagreed, for the good reason that the Constitution provides no such authority. The Twelfth Amendment says only that the vice president "shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted". He was only to preside. There is no further mention of his duties or authority.
NO TAKERS
In those first days in January, Trump allies in the command center had been lobbying legislators in the key swing states to convene special sessions to adopt their claims of fraud and reassign electoral college votes from Biden to Trump. There's no reporting that any of the states had signed on.
Ultimately, the Willard committee settled on only having Pence refuse to count Biden’s electors in the swing states that Trump had narrowly lost and then call for a week's delay, supposedly for the states to resolve concerns about conjured voting irregularities and come up with electors for Trump to replace their original slates for Biden. Or come up with deadlocks that would throw to the House of Representatives the vote for who was to become president, a vote that Trump would win because each state constitutionally has a single vote and there are more Republican dominated states.
Pence's cooperation was apparently assumed. But by January 5th, the vice president was still not on board. Trump had met with him earlier in the day. That evening in a phone call to the Willard he told Giuliani and Bannon that Pence had been "very arrogant", as reported in "Peril", Bob Woodward's and Robert Costa's book.
THE DAY OF INFAMY
Trump spoke with a number of people in the morning of the 6th. Jim Jordan called, although when a reporter asked much later, Jordan's tongue-tied evasion was parodied in a comedy routine. Epshteyn participated in phone calls from the Willard. So did Jenna Ellis, a Trump campaign attorney who had written memos on the vice president's supposed authority to halt the counting in the event of states submitting alternate elector slates. But by this point the discussion was what other options there might be to delay certification if Pence stayed with his refusal to comply.
Then came the rally, where thousands of Trump's followers assembled on the Ellipse where he told them to advance on the Capitol and stirred them to battle wit "We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
Eastman spoke before the attack and implored the vice president, through his legal counsel, Greg Jacob, to delay the certification. Eastman and Jacob exchanged a series of emails. “Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege,” Mr. Jacob wrote at 12:14 p.m., shortly after pro-Trump vandals began attacking the symbol of democracy chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Jacobs, subsequently emailed Eastman, “It was gravely, gravely irresponsible for you to entice the president with an academic theory that had no legal viability” calling Eastman "a serpent in the ear of the president".
DOWN WITH DEMOCRACY
Republicans in Congress did follow their plan to object to certain states' submission of electors. It is a process that requires Congress members of a state in both chambers to object to that state's elector slate, subject to debate, after which all in both chambers vote. This had begun. Arizona Congress members — not the state itself — had challenged the slate of electors Arizona had submitted when the mob crashing into the building caused a lockdown.
When sessions resumed at around 8:00 p.m., lawmakers continued with a Pennsylvania objection, but then dropped the rest of the states they had planned to challenge. The Eastman plan called for an alternate slate of Trump electors to be at the ready in the event of a successful challenge. But the challenges were voted down. What was extraordinary was that so effective had been Trump's undermining of the election that there were challenges. Of the 535 total of senators and representatives, a stunning total of eight senators and 139 representatives… Click to continue reading
We link to the Let’s Fix This Country website so as not to make email overlong