As someone who metabolizes political news for a living and spent years covering Donald Trump, I was broadly familiar with much of the material presented by the Jan. 6 committee during its first primetime hearing June 9. But even so, I found Reps. Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney’s presentation to be compelling, and in some instances eye-opening.
For example, the committee put together a video showing how a tweet Trump posted attacking Mike Pence as the Capitol was being ransacked — the one in which he lamented that Pence “didn’t have the courage” to help him overthrow his election loss — was read through a bullhorn by an insurrectionist standing outside the Capitol, and quickly prompted Trump fans to break out in “hang Mike Pence!” chants. The sequence illustrated how the mob was hanging on Trump’s every word, and how Trump exploited that to incite them.
Another clip played moments later juxtaposed Trump fans stomping cops on Jan. 6 with Trump’s subsequent description of the insurrectionists as “peaceful people.”
There was video I hadn’t seen before of an officer who testified before the committee — Caroline Edwards — getting knocked unconscious, and a short clip of Officer Brian Sicknick in obvious distress. (Sicknick died a day later from a stroke, and the Tucker Carlsons of the world have exploited the gap between his assault and his death to claim Sicknick didn’t actually die as a result of the Jan. 6 attack). For full blow-by-blow highlights of the hearing, be sure to check out my comprehensive Twitter video thread linked online.
In our deeply polarized society, it’s unclear how much any of this stuff will break through to people who don’t already regard Trump and his presidency as an abomination. But that’s a topic for another time. For now, I want to tick through a few more revelations from the first Jan. 6 committee hearing that I thought were new and/or notable.
Among new tidbits were clips the January 6 committee played of interviews it conduced with number of former Trump officials, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Notably, Ivanka told the committee that she “accepted” former Attorney General Bill Barr’s conclusion that the election result wasn’t tainted by fraud.
In other words, even Trump’s own daughter (if she can be believed) wasn’t buying the big lie.
While Ivanka came across as relatively reasonable in that brief video, her husband was quite the opposite in the clip of his interview featured during the hearing. In it, Kushner dissed Trump White House officials who expressed concern or threatened to resign over Trump’s effort to overthrow the election as “whining.”
Kushner told the committee he was too busy dealing with pardons to worry about Trump’s efforts to effectively end democracy. On a related note, Cheney teased that the committee has evidence of Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) and “multiple other Republican congressman” seeking pardons from the Trump White House “for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election” — a revelation indicating those elected officials knew what they tried to do was not only wrong but possibly illegal.
Unsurprisingly, instead of responding to that, the House Judiciary GOP account posted a string of tweets harping on high gas prices and dismissed the Jan. 6 committee’s findings as old news.
In reality, of course, we haven’t even had a round of congressional elections since a majority of House Republicans worked with the White House in an attempt to install a defeated president in power.
Whenever possible, the committee used the words of former Trump officials to make their case for them. For instance, Thompson played a clip of Barr’s interview with the committee during which he dismissed Trump’s claims of election fraud as “bullshit.”
Along similar lines, Cheney played a clip of Trump campaign official Jason Miller telling the committee during an interview that Trump was told by a campaign official “he was going to lose” the election — a revelation seemingly aimed at establishing Trump knew he lost but tried to overthrow the result anyway.
And Cheney also displayed text messages from Jan. 7, 2021, in which Fox News host Sean Hannity and then-Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany schemed about ways to get Trump to distance himself from “crazy people” and “stolen election talk.”
Even if no major Trumpworld figures end up testifying before the committee, the use of interview footage was a smart way to get their voices into the proceedings. You don’t have to take Thompson or Cheney’s word for it that that the big lie was just that — take it from Bill Barr or Jason Miller.
One of the revelations I found most notable was that Trump was involved in a Dec. 18, 2020 White House meeting with Michael Flynn, Sidney Powell, and Rudy Giuliani in which topics included “having the military seize voting machines and potentially rerun elections,” as Cheney described it.
Thompson and Cheney said that future hearings will establish that Trump not only gave no orders to deploy the National Guard on Jan. 6 to stop the violence and destruction, but told White House officials that the mob was “doing what they should be doing” even as his staff pleaded with him to call them off.
According to Cheney, Trump reacted to the “hang Mike Pence” chants not by expressing concern for his VP, but by telling people “maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.” Given Trump’s seemingly demented state of mind, you can begin to understand why House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has been unwilling to testify about a heated phone call he had that day with Trump.
While every other major news network covered the hearing live, Fox counter-programmed with a commercial-free Tucker Carlson show in which Carlson threw his now familiar Jan. 6 conspiracy theories against the wall, including that it was an inside job and that Nancy Pelosi is the true villain, because she didn’t do more to secure the Capitol.
Fox’s primetime broadcasts played video of the hearing while anchors worked to undermine it. But notably, as Manny Fidel of NBC pointed out, Fox producers cut away from clips showing rioters being violent and breaking into the Capitol.
It’s almost like Fox doesn’t want its viewers to see what actually happened on Jan. 6, for fear it could puncture the alternative reality bubble they’ve spent the past 18 months creating.
As I’ve alluded to in a couple spots above, Thompson and Cheney spent a good chunk of the hearing briefly touching upon revelations they vowed to flesh out with more evidence at future hearings.
I think quotes that stuck with me from Thompson and Cheney are good notes to end on for tonight.
“Any legal jargon you hear about seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, all boils down to this: Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Thompson said.
Cheney, meanwhile, offered some advice to her fellow Republicans.
“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, that your dishonor will remain,” she said.
Time will tell how reachable Republicans are these days, but if nothing else the opening hearing was vital for the historical record of the first US presidential transition of power that didn’t turn out to be peaceful. And it appears the Jan. 6 committee is just getting started.
Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist covering US politics and media and is author of Public Notice at aaronrupar.substack.com. See the linked version of this article.
From The Progressive Populist, July 1-15, 2022
Blog | Current Issue | Back Issues | Essays | Links
About the Progressive Populist | How to Subscribe | How to Contact Us