Impressions from today’s J6 hearing.

Impressions from today’s J6 hearing.

If you missed this hearing, you can find it on C-Span and elsewhere. This one was about Trump’s pressure campaigns on the states, particularly Georgia.

Recall that in early November just after the election, Trump “bombarded the state’s election officials with tweets containing baseless claims of voter fraud.”

In December, Trump began placing direct calls to officials in the state (including Georgia Governor Kemp and AG Chris Carr) urging them to go along with his plans to “decertify” his loss. (Note: “Decertify” isn’t a thing.)

Giuliani appeared before committees in Georgia trying to persuade them to reverse Biden’s win.

On Jan. 2: Trump called Raffensberger and insisted he won the election. He cited a mishmash of crazy theories citing massive fraud, but told Raffensperger that needed only to “find” 11,780 invalid votes.

This insight is from Yale professor Timothy Snyder and perfectly describes Trump’s behavior: Trump spent his life inventing stories and forcing everyone to become actors in the show. Basically, he wrote the script and demanded that people follow it.

He cared nothing about facts (which means he cared nothing about the law).

Before becoming president, he invented the “I’m a successful businessman” narrative and pushed birtherism. As president, he responded to everything from the pandemic to his election loss by ignoring facts and inventing his own script, and demanding that Republicans adopt the lies. This is because he has no ability to deal with reality or real problems (like a pandemic). So he invents crises (like foreigners invading the border) and responds to facts he doesn’t like by creating alternate facts.

“We just want the truth,” Trump told Raffensperger, and then went on to tell Raffensperger what the “truth” was. (Hint: The “truth” was whatever Trump says it was, of course.)

In keeping with fascist regimes, Trump encouraged (and did nothing to stop) threats of violence against the officials and ordinary election workers who refused to adopt the invented script.

Republican Liz Cheney said, “We cannot let America become a nation of conspiracy theories and thug violence.”

From Bennie Thompson’s opening: “And a handful of election officials in several key states stood between Donald Trump and the upending of American democracy.”

The committee’s goal today was to show that pressuring Pence was part of a larger pressure campaign on elected officials to upend American democracy.

Thompson talked about what it means to say “institutions held. . .” He said that “institutions” are not abstractions. They are made up of real people. When the “institutions hold out,” it means that the people who make up those institutions do what they’re supposed to do.

(I often say that democracy will survive if enough people want it to and are willing to do the work. People think this is optimistic. Nope– because we don’t know what people will choose to do. That’s why I often write about how autocracy has a lot of appeal. Democracy is messy, slow, grinding work. The autocrat promises to blow through the rules and get things done.)

Republicans as Witnesses

As with the past hearings, what the committee did well was bring in long-time Republicans and even Trump voters as witnesses, a move that is key to packing the most punch, reaching the largest possible audience, and lifting this hearing out of partisan politics.

The Republican witnesses rejected Trump’s false narrative, and in doing so, they faced death threats and threats to their livelihood.

At one point, witness Rusty Bowers, a Republican and Arizona House Speaker, said “I don’t want to be a winner by cheating,” a statement that would, of course, make no sense to Trump.

Bowers also testified that Guiliani actually said the words,  “We have lots of theories but we don’t have the evidence,” a statement completely unhinged.

The Fake Electors Were Duped

We got hints that the fake electors are saying they were duped. If someone finds out that he or she is part of a criminal conspiracy and says “I was duped” it’s a good bet that person is cooperating with law enforcement.

The Toll the Lies Took on People’s Lives

The heart-wrenching testimony was the stories of the death threats and disruptions to people’s lives as a result of being targeted by Donald Trump (a prelude to his targeting of Pence later.)

We heard from a Georgia poll worker, Wandrea Arshaye Moss, and her mother, who were both named by Trump as part of a whacky conspiracy theory involving suitcases of stolen ballots. Moss’s mother was warned by the FBI that she had to move out of her house for her own safety. They had to hide their identities if they went out in public. Moss was afraid to go to a grocery store.

In a pattern that we see again on January 6, Trump did nothing to stop the threats of violence.

Secretary of State Raffensperger’s wife received “disgusting sexualized” threats.

The list went on.

One of the more horrifying details was that Moss, a Black woman, was told she should be grateful that the year was 2020 and not 1920.

The Goal was Chaos

Bowers said that John Eastman asked him (in front of witnesses, including counsel) “to take a vote to decertify the electors because we had plenary authority to do so.” Eastman then basically said: “Just do it and let the courts sort it out.”

It seems to me that the goal of the fake elector plot and the pressure campaign on state officials to take the unprecedented step of refusing to certify the elections (as well as the whole January 6 insurrection) was to create chaos on the theory that the more chaos, the more likely Trump’s supporters could pull something off.