Source: Politics<\/p>\n
The Jan. 6 select committee\u2019s Tuesday hearing, ostensibly focused on extremism, drove clearly toward a subtle goal: Stripping away doubt that Donald Trump was anything but a full participant in a plot to subvert the 2020 election.<\/p>\n
The former president wasn\u2019t duped into disbelieving his own loss by fringe lawyers and advisers, select committee members argued. Rather, he assembled that squad of enablers, overrode his more sober-minded staff and forged the path that led to the chaos engulfing the Capitol, they contended during their nearly three-hour seventh hearing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe strategy is to blame people his advisers called \u2018the crazies\u2019 for what Donald Trump did,\u201d select panel vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) said at the outset. \u201cThis, of course, is nonsense. President Trump is a 76-year-old man, he is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices.\u201d<\/p>\n
What ensued was the Capitol riot committee\u2019s best effort to underscore Trump\u2019s direct hand in key moments on Jan. 6 and in the weeks before. According to evidence they laid out on Tuesday:<\/p>\n
Trump, not his advisers, opted to disregard evidence the election was not stolen from him, and the dozens of court rulings rejecting his challenges.
\n Trump, not his advisers, chose to embrace increasingly fringe strategies to stay in power after the Electoral College sealed his defeat \u2014 including initiating (but not finalizing) the appointment of Sidney Powell as a special counsel to investigate false claims of election fraud.
\n Trump, not his advisers, called for a protest to assemble in Washington on Jan. 6.
\n Trump, not his advisers, ad-libbed his speech at an Ellipse rally before the riot to ratchet up the tone of his election challenges, right before a mob descended on the Capitol building.
\n Trump, not his advisers, kept plans for a march on the Capitol secret, but ultimately directed his supporters to march on Congress and even attempted to go himself. <\/p>\n
\u201cDonald Trump participated in each substantially and personally. He oversaw or directed the activity of those involved,\u201d Cheney said in closing remarks.
As Washington chases its collective tail speculating about a possible referral by the select committee to the Justice Department, Cheney’s commentary repeatedly invoked the language of potential criminal conduct \u2014 noting that Trump could not claim to be \u201cwillfully blind\u201d to avoid responsibility for the events of Jan. 6. <\/p>\n
The potpourri of arguments she and other select panel members offered was the latest example of the dual track their public hearings have taken so far. On the one hand, the committee is focused on filling out the historical record of the attempt to overturn the election and its violent conclusion; on the other, its members are laying out an unmistakable map to a potential criminal case against the former president and his allies.<\/p>\n
The panel played numerous clips of video testimony from Trump\u2019s advisers saying they pressed Trump to concede defeat, only to be rebuffed. Former Attorney General Bill Barr recalled asking then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and son-in-law Jared Kushner how much longer the stolen-election talk would continue.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think that he\u2019s becoming more realistic and knows that there\u2019s a limit to how far he can take this,\u201d Barr recalled Meadows telling him in late November 2020. \u201cWe are working on it,\u201d Kushner chimed in, according to Barr’s videotaped testimony.<\/p>\n
Tuesday\u2019s presentation put Trump\u2019s conduct more squarely at the center of the devastating consequences that resulted from his choices. His former campaign manager Brad Parscale texted Trump ally Katrina Pierson that he worried Trump\u2019s rhetoric was directly responsible for the death of Ashli Babbitt, who was shot by a Capitol Police officer as she attempted to breach a lobby off the House chamber during the riot.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou do realize this was going to happen,\u201d Pierson wrote Parscale on the evening of Jan. 6, an exchange broadcast by the select panel.<\/p>\n
Parscale responded: \u201cYeah. If I was trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt wasn\u2019t the rhetoric,\u201d Pierson replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cKatrina,\u201d Parscale said. \u201cYes it was.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stephen Ayres, a member of the mob that breached the Capitol who has since pleaded guilty to related charges, helped the committee underscore that Trump\u2019s decision to remain largely silent during the worst of the violence prolonged the riot. When Trump finally tweeted that rioters should leave the Capitol, after 4 p.m. on Jan. 6, he noted that many of them did.<\/p>\n
“Basically when President Trump put his tweet out. We literally left right after that,\u201d Ayres testified. \u201cTo me, if he would have done that earlier in the day … maybe we wouldn’t be in this bad of a situation.”<\/p>\n
The committee intends to home in on that point even more forcefully at its next \u2014 and potentially final \u2014 hearing next week, focused on Trump’s inaction as the violence at the Capitol built to a fatal pitch. Trump\u2019s top White House lawyer Pat Cipollone recently told the committee, in testimony that was teased at Tuesday\u2019s hearing, that Trump could have, at any point, stepped to a camera and attempted to quell the unrest.<\/p>\n
Perhaps the most mysterious direct Trump action that the select committee highlighted Tuesday appeared to seed its latest evidence of potential witness tampering. At the end of the hearing, Cheney revealed that Trump had tried to call an unnamed witness in the select panel\u2019s investigation after its most recent hearing with former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson \u2014 someone she said \u201cyou have not yet seen in these hearings.\u201d <\/p>\n
That person ignored the call and told their lawyer, who went on to inform the committee, which then informed the Department of Justice, Cheney said.<\/p>\n
Taylor Budowich, a spokesperson for the former president, tweeted in response that Cheney was circulating “innuendos and lies that go unchallenged, unconfirmed, but repeated as fact.”<\/p>\n
\u201cThis has been an ongoing pattern, and we’re trying to send the message that witness tampering is a crime in the United States of America,\u201d said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who co-led Tuesday\u2019s hearing. \u201cPeople should not be approaching witnesses to try to get them to alter their testimony.\u201d<\/p>\n