WASHINGTON – It was all a lie, stories of stuffed ballot boxes, manipulated voting machines and constitutional “flexibility” that would have allowed Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election and send them back to state legislatures Republicans.
The first three House Committee hearings on Jan. 6 have deeply undermined, if not demolished, the post-election myths incessantly repeated by former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters and accepted and amplified by Republicans in Congress.
A parade of Republican witnesses — his attorney general, William P. Barr, his daughter Ivanka Trump, and his own campaign attorneys — learned that he had lost the election and was told. Mr. Trump was informed that the demands he was making on Mr. Pence to block his defeat unilaterally were illegal. Even the most active coup conspirator, Conservative attorney John C. Eastman, admitted before Jan. 6 that his scheme was illegal and unconstitutional, and then asked for a presidential pardon after it led to violence. from the crowd.
However, the most striking revelation to date may be the extent to which Mr. Trump for the truth and the rule of law has penetrated the Republican Party, rooted in the fertile ground of a right-wing electorate inspired by conspiracy theories and well cared for by their preferred means. The Republican response to the hearings — a combination of indifference, amusement, and duplication — reflects how central the lie of stolen elections to party identity has become.
In Washington, Republicans in Congress have not broken with Mr. Trump or spent much energy trying to refute the findings of the investigation. And from Nevada’s career as secretary of state to Michigan’s gubernatorial contest, Republican candidates have accepted the fictitious conspiracy in their 2022 campaigns.
“I’ve been fighting for a fair, honest, and transparent election since before January 6, and this struggle continues,” said Michigan State Representative Steve Carra, whose re-election has been blessed by Mr. . Trump and he said Friday that he has observed. some, but not many of the audiences. “Absence ballots sent unsolicited, signature verification relaxed, mailboxes everywhere, especially in the Democratic area; everything deserves more detailed scrutiny.”
Like mint in the garden, the seeds that the Trump team planted between election day 2020 and January 6, 2021, are now growing out of control, with the help of the former president’s allies.
Jarome Bell, one of the top candidates to challenge Rep. Elaine Luria, a Virginia Democrat, has been traveling through her Republican-leaning district showing voters a film by right-wing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza that promotes false allegations of fraud. The hearings, he said on Friday, “have had no impact on me.” 2000 Mules “has a bigger impact on what really happened.” He added: “1/6 commission is cover-up.”
Jon Rocha, a Trump-backed candidate for state representative in Michigan, also quoted the film and boasted that he had not seen any of the audiences, “not even a 30-second clip.”
One of the reasons falsehoods have flourished is the failure of Republicans who do not believe they have backed down. Before the January 6 hearings began, Republican leaders pledged a strong “quick response” effort to counter the narratives that would emerge.
The issues of the hearings of the House Committee on January 6
But there has been no backlash from the Republican National Committee or any other organization to the revelations that Mr. Trump continued to pressure Mr. He intends to annul the election results even after it has been said that it is illegal to do so.
No Republican leader offered an answer to the testimony of retired federal appellate judge J. Michael Luttig, a revered Conservative, who said Thursday that Mr. Trump gave Mr. Pence an order to execute him. it would have provoked “the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic.”
No one bothered to counter the panel’s finding, revealed Monday, that Mr. Trump and his campaign raised hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters based on the false pretense of mass election fraud, using money raised for a non-existent election defense fund.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has chosen not to get involved. And as they try to reschedule hearings, House Republicans have pushed voters to look elsewhere: rising gas prices, inflation and migrants on the southern border.
Only Mr. Trump seems especially irritated by the exercise, dismayed by the testimony of his daughter, who shared details of his abusive phone call with Mr. Pence on the morning of January 6 and said he trusted Mr. Barr when he said the 2020 election was not stolen.
“It’s a one-way street, it’s a manipulated deal, it’s a disgrace,” Mr. Trump, who did not regret, said Friday in a speech in Nashville in which he called Jan. 6 a “simple protest that was out of control “. he continued to make false claims and big conspiracy theories about election fraud.
But if their allies in the Republican leadership are not contradicting the message that the attack was fueled by lies, they are also not acknowledging that the election was not stolen.
And 50 years after Richard M. Nixon’s henchmen stormed the Democratic headquarters at the Watergate Hotel, hearings sparked by the two scandals highlight how the Republican Party has changed dramatically. Leading Republican leaders then reacted to increasingly condemnatory revelations about their president by siding with the Democrats and forcing Mr. Nixon to step down. Today, Republican leaders are silent or despise the committee for discovering a steady stream of Mr. Trump.
Representatives Bennie Thompson, Liz Cheney and Adam B. Schiff “will not stop lying about their political opponents,” California Rep. Rep. of Wyoming. and Democratic member of California.
Representative Peter Meijer of Michigan, one of 10 Republicans who voted in favor of the removal of Mr. Trump to incite on January 6, said that so far the hearings have been “a reminder of how deeply divided, even from the point of view of information consumption, we are.”
Many of his constituents have not even seen the videotaped testimony where the case against Mr. Trump: Only images of police removing barricades to allow rioters to enter the Capitol on January 6. Some blame non-existent FBI provocateurs for the violence, in line with a denial. conspiracy theory accepted by Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson and others on the right.
Mr. Meijer said he had heard much more from right-wing voters lamenting the “Jan. 6 political prisoners” than those from the center demanding responsibility for the attack.
Most voters, however, are not paying attention, said Rep. David Valadao of California, another Republican who voted in favor of impeachment.
“Talking to voters at home right now, I mean, fuel prices, food prices, baby formula, whatever,” Mr. Valadao. “There are so many things people are focusing on right now that they’re not paying attention to the January 6 things as much as I know a lot of people would want them to do.”
When asked if the hearings could do Republicans a favor by facilitating the search for an alternative presidential candidate in 2024 that Mr. Trump said, “I don’t know if there are enough people who are paying attention to where this big problem will be. Impact.”
But in a season of Republican primaries fueled by pro-Trump fervor, many candidates have emerged as their party’s candidates for top positions in large part because they campaigned on the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen by President Biden.
Republican candidates for governor in Pennsylvania, Secretary of State in Nevada, Senate in Nevada, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, and the Attorney General in Texas tried to cancel the 2020 election or accept false allegations of election fraud.
Mayra Flores, a Texas Republican who won a seat in the House in a special election on Tuesday, declined to say whether Mr. Biden won in 2020, telling The San Antonio Express-News: “I speak only in general. “There is electoral fraud.”
And there are more things to come. State Representative Ron Hanks, running to challenge Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, in the Colorado Republican primary on June 28, marched on the Capitol on January 6 and launched his campaign with an announcement that he was shown firing a fake Dominion voting machine, a central device for an extensive conspiracy theory about votes allegedly stolen by foreign powers to Mr. Trump.
On Monday, the committee showed a video-recorded deposition in which Mr. Barr at one point could barely suppress his laughter at the absurdity of these stories and testified that Mr. Barr. Trump should have “detached himself from reality” if he believed them.
In Michigan, a fierce competition to choose the Republican to challenge Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is being closely led by Ryan Kelley, a real estate broker who was arrested this month and charged with participating in the Jan. 6 riot. Mr. Rocha, the candidate for the state chamber in western Michigan, said voters were much more concerned about gas prices and empty store shelves than the Jan. 6 hearings, and then offered that voters, in fact, are still very angry at “electoral integrity.”
“They did it in 2020. They’re now finding new ways to get Republicans out of the polls this year,” he said.
In Arizona, the Republican top candidate for governor, Kari Lake, has made her claims about the “stolen election” central to her campaign. Mark Finchem, a candidate for secretary of state, was on the steps of the Capitol on January 6th. And Blake Masters, who hopes to challenge Senator Mark Kelly, the incumbent Democrat, has unfoundedly suggested that …