they will return That’s what members of the House Select Committee investigating former US President Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election promised at the end of their last public hearing of the summer on Thursday .
The derision for the resumption of the hearings in September coincided with the tenor of the proceedings that have taken place during the last six weeks, which the commission – made up of five Democrats and two renegade Republicans – has tried to categorize as mandatory television. .
In the end, the carefully orchestrated televised testimony was less about surprising viewers with new details about the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol than it was about fleshing out what was already known in a way that grabbed their attention and stick
“I think they did an extraordinary job of bringing us all into the tick-tock of the president’s inner circle,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics.
“They painted an incredibly vivid picture of how close the president was to pulling off what would have been a coup.”
These are some of the key ways the committee reinforced its narrative that Trump had a clear and deliberate intent to overturn the election at any cost.
LOOK | The Jan. 6 panel looks at what Trump was doing as the riots unfolded:
New details emerge about Donald Trump’s actions during the January 6 attack
The Jan. 6 panel delves into what Donald Trump did and didn’t do as the Capitol was attacked by rioters. During its final hearing of the summer, the panel delved into the 187 minutes in which Trump did not act, despite pleas from aides and allies.
Multiple strategies to overturn elections
Weeding out the various ways Trump and some of his allies wanted to overturn the election became “like playing Whac-a-Mole,” former Attorney General William Barr said in a statement delivered at one of the hearings .
The proposals include:
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Get state officials to decertify voters.
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Asking state officials to file fake voters.
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Seizing voting machines under the pretext that they were hacked.
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Get Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the electoral votes in the January 6 joint session of Congress, as he was constitutionally required to do, and send them to the states for a recount or declare Trump the winner based on- if in a fake board of voters.
Among the lawyers and aides in Trump’s orbit, two camps emerged: “Team Normal,” as former campaign adviser Bill Stepien he described it, which included Barr and White House lawyers Pat Cipollone and Eric Herschman; and the group of rogue lawyers trying to overturn the vote, including Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
The latter group, Cipollone declared, had “a general disregard for the importance of backing up what you say with facts.”
LOOK | Pat Cipollone on Persistent Claims of Voter Fraud:
‘You’ve got to put up or shut up’: Former senior White House staffer
In his statement about the deadly attack at the US Capitol on January 6, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone said he was concerned that people would still allege voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election and thought Sidney Powell’s proposal for the federal government to take over voting machines was a ‘terrible idea’.
Some of the more vivid detail out of hearings related to a late-night meeting in the Oval Office on December 18, 2020, in which the two sides clashed, shouting and hurling insults at each other to the point that White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, texted a colleague. “the west wing is unhinged.”
Here is the Hutchinson-Ornato text string more clearly. pic.twitter.com/9YEOw8FGp0
—@kyledcheney
Extended pressure campaign on the DOJ
Several witnesses described the consequences of a relentless pressure campaign to discredit the election results. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who received a call of Trump himself, and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers detailed threats against their families, while Atlanta poll worker Wandrea “Shaye” Moss told the committee that the harassment she suffered and her mother, also an electoral worker, turned their lives upside down. “
We also heard details from Department of Justice (DOJ) officials of Trump’s attempts to get them to back up his discredited claims of voter fraud, including by firing his own acting attorney general and replacing him with Jeffrey Clark, an attorney general attached that he was willing to promote false claims about electoral irregularities.
“Just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and al [Republican] congressmen,” Trump said acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue told him.
LOOK | Justice officials describe the lobbying campaign:
Trump pressured the Justice Department to overturn the election, the hearing said
Three former senior Justice Department officials testified about US President Donald Trump’s pressure on them to overturn the 2020 election.
Trump knew there was no evidence of voter fraud
One of the most consistent refrains from the hearings was that his closest aides and the Department of Justice told Trump, on several occasions and as far back as late November 2020, that no evidence of fraud had been found election, but it continued. publicly advance claims.
“Now, we have clear evidence from all of his top brass, including Bill Barr and so many others, that the president was very aware that he lost the election and was shown all the evidence to prove it,” said Ravi Perry . chairman of the political science department at Howard University in Washington, DC “Before, you could argue that maybe Trump didn’t know.”
Some of those who helped draw up the plans knew it too. A lawyer for Pence testified that John Eastman, who suggested that Pence could certify an alternate list of electors and declare Trump the winner, knew it was illegal and is one of several members of Trump’s inner circle who ask for pardons, according to the committee. He and Clark were served subpoenas as the hearings unfolded as part of a separate DOJ investigation into the attempted election nullification.
LOOK | Eastman, Giuliani and Meadows asked for pardons:
Giuliani, Meadows wanted pardons for Jan. 6 attack, former aide says
Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified Tuesday that Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had encouraged Donald Trump to talk about pardoning those involved in the Jan. 6 attack, and that both Meadows and Rudy Giuliani wanted presidential pardons.
Trump was determined to join the march on Capitol Hill
Some of the most colorful witnesses arrived Day 6when former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson described staffers’ efforts to prevent the president from accompanying supporters to the Capitol.
Hutchinson opened a new line of inquiry when he testified that Trump’s deputy chief of staff told him that the president had tried to take the wheel of the presidential vehicle, known as the Beast, and force the Secret Service to drive it. in the Capitol.
LOOK | One witness describes how Trump tried to get to the Capitol:
Trump was determined to join the Jan. 6 mob, former White House aide says
A last-minute committee hearing on Jan. 6 saw dramatic and damning testimony from former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who said then-President Donald Trump was determined to join the mob, ruled out the presence of armed rioters and ordered the removal of metal detectors.
After the hearing, speculation arose that members of the Secret Service were denying the account, prompting the committee to subpoena his text messages, some of which had been deleted. The Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general has since launched an investigation into the missing texts.
Hutchinson also had one of the most memorable quotes from the audience when he revealed that Trump knew some of his rally attendees were armed.
Cassidy Hutchinson: “I heard the president say something like, ‘I don’t care if they have guns.’ They are not here to hurt me. Take out the effect magazines. Let my people in, they can leave. from here to the Capitol.'” pic.twitter.com/42RRdO7dNh
—@cspan
That detail, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner argues, makes Trump’s failure to intervene all the more egregious once the rioters he incited tore through the Capitol.
“Donald Trump launched this attack, and now we know he knew it was an armed attack,” he said. “So it’s not a dereliction of duty [not] cancel an attack you launch. It is a determination that the attack you launched will succeed.”
What we haven’t heard
“We have a lot more questions about the Secret Service,” Rep. Elaine Luria, a member of the committee, said Friday on ABC’s talk show The View, where she asked why some of the agents had hired private lawyers.
Learning exactly what the Secret Service witnessed and did on Jan. 6 is crucial, says Frank Bowman, a professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law and an impeachment expert.
“His loyalty to the constitutional order as opposed to the [president] it has to be absolute,” Bowman said.
Secret Service agents stand outside the Palm Beach County Main Library as Trump votes in the presidential election on October 24, 2020 in West Palm Beach, Florida. An investigation is underway to retrieve text messages from agents who were with the president on Oct. 24, 2020. Jan. 6, 2021. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)
He would also like Pence to testify before the commission. While we learned over the course of the eight hearings how much Trump tried to pressure the vice president not to certify the results and vilified him when he did, Pence himself has yet to give a full account.
“What were his contacts with the president, people around the president; what was suggested to him; what were his responses; what happened that day?” Bowman said.
Bowman said he doesn’t expect the committee to…