THE JAN 6^th COMMITTEE MADE THE FORMER PRESIDENT’S GUILT VERY CLEAR

 

                                                …The January 6^th Committee

 

The White House Counsel told his story without revealing any Executive Privileges

 

OK, so now the long awaited for, prime time, January 6^th Committee White House episode showed what the former president was doing as the mob was attacking the Capitol on January 6^th, 2021.

So, what did we learn from this 3 hour display of a president that to this day, continues to lie about his winning the 2020 election?

To me, there are four areas that were made crystal clear during this event, and it did show, without a doubt, that the former Commander-in-Chief displayed that he was holding himself to be above the law.

First, the January 6^th Committee made the story very clear with their witness testimonies of White House aides Matthew Pottinger and Sarah Matthews, along with video inputs from the aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, and further details from former White House counsel, Pat Cipollone.

We then received the long-awaited for, more detailed testimony from Cipollone, and his information didn’t disappoint.

Cipollone offered a timeline of events of that day that reinforces just how derelict of his duty the former President Trump was on January 6^th.

There had been questions about just how quickly Trump appreciated the gravity of the situation on Jan. 6, particularly how much he knew about the violence when he tweeted attacking the Vice President, Mike Pence, while rioters were in the Capitol.  Those questions were answered last Thursday

Cipollone said he personally learned the gravity of the situation even before rioters had entered the Capitol.  Crucially, he said, his and other staffers’ push for a strong statement to quell the violence began as early as around 2 PM that day..

He declined to comment on conversations with Trump, properly citing his executive privilege, but said that he repeatedly and forcefully pushed for this action inside the White House.

“I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response…statement, a public statement… that people need to leave the Capitol,” Cipollone said.

His timeline would mean that two or more additional hours passed before Trump’s video telling people to go home. And it places the concern, before many of the text messages we’ve seen from White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s phone.

And Cipollone repeatedly sought to emphasize he wasn’t the only one making the case in the intervening two hours.

“Just to be clear, many people suggested it… not just me,” he said. “Many people felt the same way.”

He confirmed the people occasional included Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump, White House lawyer Eric Herschmann and Chief of Staff Meadows.

The committee also cited an unnamed witness who said Trump knew about the violence even earlier, 11 minutes after his speech on the Ellipse. But Cipollone might be the best evidence yet that people were calling for action extremely early in the insurrection.

Next, while Cipollone’s testimony was perhaps more explicitly damaging, another portion of his testimony arguably spoke louder…that was his struggling occasional silence.

At one point, Cipollone was asked if anyone on White House staff didn’t want the rioters to go home. “On the staff?” he responded. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said she wanted to know about anybody “in the White House.” Cipollone said he couldn’t “think of anybody” who didn’t want that. Then the committee members asked him about one other person: Trump himself.

Then came the counsel’s awkwardness in being unable to comment

Cipollone said he understood the question to be about White House staff, which it initially was, but Cheney indeed clarified it was about anybody in the White House. He was then asked directly about Trump. Cipollone hemmed and hawed, unsure of answering the question. He talked about whether it might be privileged, conferring with his lawyer. He seemed to want to give his view, but struggled with whether to do it. “I can’t reveal communications,” he said, “but obviously I think in my …” he paused, looking toward his counsel again. Not appearing to get any verbal guidance, he concluded, “Yeah.”

It would seem relatively straightforward for Cipollone to give his perception of Trump’s feelings, leaving any personal conversations aside. And he seemed to genuinely want to. He also could have said his perception was that Trump didn’t like the riot.  But he couldn’t say it.

The next take away was that Trump wouldn’t give in, even on the next day, Jan. 7

The committee played new evidence, that even the day after the riot, Trump pointedly declined to admit his loss of the election

In new outtakes of a video that Trump recorded on Jan. 7, he read a script that said “this election is now over.” But he said he preferred to merely say the election had been certified by Congress.

“I don’t want to say the election’s over,” Trump said. “I just want to say Congress has certified the results, without saying the election’s over, okay?”

Ivanka Trump cut in to suggest that Congress certifying the results meant it was indeed over.

Trump’s actions in the 4:17 p.m. video released on Jan. 6, and even that night, made clear he wasn’t going to completely let go of his stolen-election talk. He tweeted about 6 p.m. saying, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

But this footage shows him just a day after the carnage on Jan. 6, when the dust had settled, balking at explicitly admitting the election had ended.

Similarly, Ms. Matthews testified that White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told her Trump “did not want to include any sort of mention of peace” in a tweet Trump was being urged to send the afternoon of Jan. 6. She said Ivanka Trump prevailed upon him to include the phrase: “Stay peaceful.”

Certainly, it all underscores that Trump simply didn’t view what happened that day in the way that virtually everyone else did.

Finally, the point was driven home with Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell.

The witnesses Thursday night were Mr. Pottinger and Ms. Matthews. But throughout the hearing, two other Republicans unwittingly played prominent roles. And they happened to be the GOP leaders of the House and Senate.

Ms. Cheney began the hearing by noting, correctly, that in the days after Jan. 6, but virtually no Republicans actually defended Trump. In fact, even many who voted against impeachment sharply criticized Trump.

Videos of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) were played to drive that home. Both faulted Trump for failing to quell the violence when it began.

McCarthy said, “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters” because he didn’t act “immediately.” McConnell said, “It was obvious that only President Trump could end this” because people were acting on Trump’s behalf. (McConnell also faulted Trump for inflaming supporters with false voter-fraud claims.)

Cheney summarized that “McConnell reached those conclusions based on what he knew then, without any of the much more detailed evidence you will see today.” She added of McCarthy, perhaps needling the guy who helped push her out of GOP leadership for criticizing Trump over Jan. 6: “Their own Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, was scared.”

The committee would repeatedly return to the words of both Republican leaders, who roundly criticized Trump on the floors of their respective chambers.

This whole sequence reinforced how the Republicans then turned 180° on a dime. It can be easy to forget just how strongly the GOP lawmakers (if not the party base) criticized Trump. As the committee got around to describing Trump’s actions that day, it sought to emphasize that GOP leaders saw the matter as pretty cut-and-dried a year and a half ago, when we knew considerably less than today.

The whole evening made it very clear that the former president is still lying and he is totally delusional about having won the 2020 election.

His presidential counsel, Mr. Cipollone, the GOP House and Senate leaders, and his White House aides, what they were all saying was the same thing, and what they were saying is still true. 

“Donald Trump lost the election.”

Copyright G. Ater 2022