Did I Hear Someone Say Witness Tampering, Mr. Chairman?
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Did I Hear Someone Say Witness Tampering, Mr. Chairman?
Yesterday's hearing finally put the Insurrectionist in Chief at the center of the conspiracy to overthrow the government on January 6, 2020. And the J6 Committee could not have told the story better.
If you missed yesterday’s January 6 hearings, you can watch them here: if you know someone who wants to catch up on what happened, please:
Yesterday, political junkies informally agreed that the most important snub delivered by this year’s Emmy nominating committee was not to NBC’s “This Is Us,” but to the televised hearings of the United States House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol.
Yesterday’s episode 7, which ran over the normal 2-hour mark to make room for snippets of former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s testimony, and testimony from members of Cipillone’s team, was a doozy. The hearing was originally advertised as an opportunity to hear from Stephen Ayres, a penitent participant in the attack, and former Oathkeeper Jason Van Tatenhove, a self-styled journalist and intimate of Oathkeeper chief Stewart Rhodes.
But the three-hour event delivered so much more that it was as if we were lured in with white supremacy—“Look! Over there! A real Oath Keeper!”—and stayed for the seditious conspiracy.
The Committee delivered a riveting, multi-media narrative of the days leading up to the attempted coup of January 6, 2021, narrated by a half-dozen witnesses who fought it out with each other. The inescapable conclusion? Nothing that happened on January 6 was accidental. No aspect of what seemed like spontaneous chaos instigated by enraged, unorganized, Trump partisans was unplanned. The violence was deliberate, and through text messages, testimony from a Twitter employee, witness statements, and social media posts, yesterday’s viewing audience came to understand how forces converged, under Trump’s direction, on a Congress preparing to count the electoral college votes that would officially make Joe Biden the president-elect.
Trump was determined not to let that happen, and he assembled an A-team of people eager to help him overthrow the government.
Using a video montage of witness testimony to drive the story forward, the Committee shifted the narrative about those crucial days before January 6, leaving no doubt that the attack on the Capitol was a planned event, not a peaceful march that got out of hand because of a few bad actors. Although the Committee has already established Trump’s knowledge that the crowd assembled on the Ellipse was armed, as well as his (foiled) determination to march with them as their leader, our knowledge of January 5, particularly the evening of January 5, is now more complete in two ways.
Thing One is Trump’s explicit rejection of counsel provided by his personal legal advisors, a set of normies who were holding up giant, screaming, red stop signs in these final hours. Instead, he embraced conspirators who not only told him what he wanted to hear but also promoted illegal plans to seize power. They also heped him assemble a private army made up of Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters that would lead the MAGA faithful—including people who fantasized on social media about killing Capitol police and members of Congress—over the top.
This group included John Eastman, Rudolph Giuliani, Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and the gruesomely fascinating conspiracy theorist and former federal prosecutor, Sidney “Release the Kraken” Powell. But we also now have a better fix on who the cutouts were who transmitted Trump’s instructions to the paramilitaries and MAGA activists. Roger Stone and retired general Mike Flynn are two of them, but so are a range of alt-right media personalities like Ali Alexander (deposed last month in front of a D.C. grand jury) and former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who is set to go on trial next week for contempt of Congress (when he ran out his appeals earlier this week, Bannon decided that he would appear before the J6 Committee after all.)
Three images stick in my mind from the first two hours of yesterday’s proceedings, in which the story of that evening was told by toggling back and forth between the Cipollone team and the insurrectionist Trump legal team. There were also cameo appearances from your tour guide, former Attorney General Bill Barr, and Eugene Scalia (son of the late Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia.)
One is Giuliani driving the January 6 plot forward, knowing that what he was proposing was illegal. By his own report, he made no legal arguments, only advocating force and screaming at the normies that they were just “pussies.” Incredibly, he continued to insist to the J6 investigators that he still believed they were.
A second is Sidney Powell, sucking down Diet Dr. Pepper (awesome product placement, guys!) When the investigator asked how many minutes she, Flynn, Giuliani, and “the Overstock guy” had alone with Trump before the normies arrived in force, she estimated that it was 10 minutes, and cracked: “I bet Pat Cipollone set a new land speed record.” As Powell described the ensuing melée, one in which she may—or may not—have been appointed a White House Special Counsel and granted a security clearance (!!!), she deplored the fact that the legal team trying to keep their client out of the slammer “showed nothing but contempt and disdain of the President.”
As I watched Powell, I was overcome with a vision of one of those horror movies in which human flesh falls away to reveal a lizard beneath. “I mean, if — if it had been me sitting in his chair,” Powell said (now imagine a fly meandering by and a long tongue zipping out to snap it into her mouth), “I would have fired all of them that night and had `em escorted out of the building.”
It was one of the best depictions of dueling realities I have ever seen. “And then shortly before we left and it totally blew up,” Powell continued, “that's when Cipollone and/or Herschmann and whoever the other young man was said you can name her whatever you want to name her, and no one's going to pay any attention to it.”
UNKNOWN: How did he respond? How did the president respond to that?
SIDNEY POWELL: Something like, You see what I deal with. I deal with this all the time.
The third and final moment in yesterday’s hearing that we should bookmark is a brief appearance by Trump’s senior advisor for policy and White House director of speechwriting Stephen Miller. In his cameo, Miller described the speech he wrote for Trump to deliver on the Ellipse, which was edited by Cippolone’s team to take out the part about marching to the Capitol. When the lawyers left, Trump re-edited the speech, formally in the wee hours of January 6 and informally when he delivered it ten hours later.
I predict that this moment will be important to the plot for two reasons: first, as we learned, a close circle around Trump, Miller among them, not only knew that he would send his supporters to the Capitol but also conspired to withhold that information from others so that the attack would appear to be spontaneous. So, the question of who knew what, and when they knew it: how much did that circle expand before the attack on the Capitol? And why did a Republican member of Congress message the White House, asking about the “safety plan”?
Second, you should be asking yourself this question: where was Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and how did those crazy people get into the Oval Office in the first place? Thus, Meadows’ testimony may be the linchpin to everything, which may be why he is working so hard not to testify.
I can also almost promise you that Miller’s brief appearance yesterday is an hors d’oeuvre and that there will be more to come. Of all the witnesses, as he squirmed, hemmed, hawed, and looked anywhere but at those taking his testimony, Miller is the one who looked most like someone being interrogated on Law and Order: SVU.
Now, let’s go to Thing Two. A new story is emerging: Donald Trump, often not credited with being very smart, or having much of an attention span, seems to have masterminded a complex plot with numerous moving parts after he lost the election.
As a result, the Committee’s theory of the case emerged powerfully yesterday. Trump, it seems, orchestrated a “wheel and spoke” conspiracy in which one person manages multiple crimes simultaneously, all of which appear unrelated and unconnected to each other—and, importantly, to the conspirator in chief.
After the break, the Committee returned to lead Ayres and Tatenhove through their sad little stories of being hoodwinked by Trump and the alt-right. What was the point? Their stories graphically underlined how unimportant most of the 800 insurrectionists were, and how little they understood about what they were doing on January 6.
Because the real action was in the White House. To close, Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY 01) took the reins to preview the next episode for us. “We will walk through the events of January 6th next week minute by minute,” she said.
“And one more item,” Cheney continued as if that item was a mere afterthought. “After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation.”
Seconds before the end of the hearing, it was as if the world had stopped breathing. Why? Because you may recall that, after White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, we—the American people, who are now not just an audience but a jury of sorts—were introduced to an important legal concept: witness tampering, which is a federal crime. And that’s what Donald Trump allegedly did when he placed that call.
Not a strand of her gray blonde hair out of place, Cheney, icy and composed, continued: “ A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings.”
That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump's call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call.
Their lawyer alerted us and this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice. Let me say one more time, we will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
“I yield back.”
It was the best mic drop in American political history.
Short takes:
New York City, like every other major metropolis, has seen escalating violence since the pandemic began in 2020, violence that has included unprovoked attacks on the street, in subways, and in commercial establishments. Recently, bodega owner José Alba stabbed a man who attacked him in his own business. District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Alba with murder, which is controversial, particularly among the city’s beleaguered small business owners. But in many states, a Stand Your Ground Law would protect Alba from prosecution. So, “in the name of a self-defense claim by a bodega owner, some folks want to bring that same deadly concept to the country’s biggest and most dense city,” Keith Reed writes at The Root. “What could possibly go wrong? Literally everything.” (July 12, 2022)
In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Donald Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton said that his former boss couldn’t possibly have planned the J6 coup. Why? Because, as Diana Glebova reports at The New Republic, “As somebody who has helped plan coup d’états, not here, but, you know, other places, it takes a lot of work.” Enough. Said. (July 12, 2022)
Although the chief culpability for the loss of abortion rights lies with the Supreme Court’s ultra-right majority, The New Republic’s Jess Coleman rightly points out that for decades, Democrats failed to establish reproductive rights as human rights. Instead, they allowed Roe to suffer a thousand cuts. “Future generations will wonder why the left spent the decades following the Roe ruling whittling down the idea of abortion to a mere medical procedure protected by a flimsy legal precedent,” Coleman writes, “instead of asserting the fact that reproductive freedoms are part and parcel with other fundamental rights worth defending with the full weight of the Democratic Party’s political power.” (July 8, 2022)
Did I Hear Someone Say Witness Tampering, Mr. Chairman?
Brava, Claire!