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      Trump’s attempted coup continues – even after January 6 hearings are over for now | Robert Reich

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      Trump’s attempted coup continues – even after January 6 hearings are over for nowRobert ReichThe committee has produced history’s most detailed account of an American president’s cruel and seditious pursuit of power. Even now, Trump continues to push states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election The House of Representatives’ select committee investigating the January 6 attack has finished its hearings, at least for now.But Trump’s attempted coup continues.He has not stopped giving speeches to stir up angry mobs with his big lie that the 2020 election was stolen. He gave another fiery address Friday evening in Arizona.How the January 6 panel set the stage for a criminal case against TrumpRead moreHe is actively backing congressional candidates who propound his big lie.Trump continues to push states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election. Just last week he urged Wisconsin assembly speaker Robin Vos to support a resolution to retract Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden.He is encouraging Republican lawmakers in several states to pass legislation allowing them to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote.Meanwhile, the lives of committee members and their families have been threatened. Witnesses have received gangster-style warnings not to cooperate.The committee’s message to all of America, including Republicans: Stop supporting this treachery.The committee has made that treachery crystal clear.It has shown the deception behind Trump’s big lie, including Trump’s attorney general William Barr, saying “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations” and that promoting it was “a grave disservice to the country”.It has demonstrated non-partisan repulsion toward Trump’s attempted coup, even in Trump’s White House. As former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson said, “I was disgusted. It was unpatriotic, it was un-American. We were watching the Capitol building get defaced over a lie.”It has made open appeals to Republican lawmakers to stop supporting the attempt. The Republican vice-chair of the committee, Liz Cheney, warned her Republican colleagues “who are defending the indefensible” that “there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain”.It has revealed how average Americans fell for Trump’s treachery, with disastrous results. Witness Stephen Ayres, who described himself as “nothing but a family man and a working man”, participated in the January 6 attack because Trump “basically put out, you know, come to the Stop the Steal rally, you know, and I felt like I needed to be down here”.And it has reminded Americans of their duties to democracy. As committee chair Bennie Thompson put it: “When you’re on the losing side, that doesn’t mean you have to be happy about it … but you can’t turn violent.”Committee member Jamie Raskin recalled Lincoln’s warning that politicians who encourage mobs to rampage and terrorize will destroy the bonds of social trust necessary for democracy to work.It is impossible to know whether the hearings will lead to criminal indictments and convictions of Trump and his enablers.But the hearings already appear to have convinced some Trump supporters that he is a dangerous charlatan.The percentage of Republicans who say Trump misled people about the 2020 election has ticked up since last month, while Trump’s enormous fundraising operation has slowed. A New York Times/Siena College poll last week showed that nearly half of Republican primary voters would rather vote for a Republican other than Trump in 2024.History teaches that it is possible to bring down an American demagogue by putting his wickedness on display for all to see.In 1954, I watched the Army-McCarthy hearings. The Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy – whose communist witch hunt was ending careers and debasing much of the US government – had charged the US army with lax security at a top-secret army facility. The army hired Boston lawyer Joseph Welch to make its case.At a session on 9 June 1954, after McCarthy accused one of Welch’s young staff attorneys of being a communist, Welch responded in words that led to McCarthy’s undoing: “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”When McCarthy tried to continue his attack, Welch angrily interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”Almost overnight, McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.Now, the January 6 committee has produced history’s most detailed account of an American president’s cruel and seditious pursuit of power.Will it be enough to stop Trump’s ongoing attempted coup? That depends on whether Americans heed the committee’s implicit plea to ensure that American democracy endures. This article was amended on 24 July 2022. McCarthy was a senator for Wisconsin, not Minnesota.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His new book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com
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      ‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracy

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      ‘US democracy will not survive for long’: how January 6 hearings plot a roadmap to autocracyTrump’s efforts to subvert the elections laid bare the system’s weaknesses, exposing it to greater exploitation They promised the January 6 hearings would “blow the roof off the house”, presenting America with the truth about Donald Trump’s attack on democracy culminating in the US Capitol insurrection. In the end, the roof of the House, where the summer season of hearings reached their finale on Thursday night, remained intact, though mightily shaken.January 6 panel: shining a light on American democracy’s nose diveRead moreIt will take time for historians to assess whether the eight public sessions were comparable to the 1973 Watergate hearings, as Jamie Raskin, a Democratic member of the January 6 committee, predicted. Yet it’s already clear that after 19 hours and 11 minutes of testimony, filmed depositions, documentary evidence and raw footage of the Capitol attack the hearings have generated a mountain of words and images that will linger long in the collective memory.We know now that on the day that the United States suffered the worst assault on the Capitol since the British ravaged it in 1814, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel from a secret service agent to turn his presidential SUV in the direction of the violent mob so he could join them. We know that when he exhorted his followers to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell” he was aware that many of them were armed with guns and wearing body armor.We know from Thursday night that when his close aides pleaded with him to call off the attack, he refused, spending 187 minutes watching events unfold on TV in the White House dining room while swatting away increasingly desperate pleas for him to act until it was clear that his hopes of violently overthrowing the election had faded.To those who track anti-democratic movements there is a chilling familiarity to this rich evocation of a president descending into an abyss of fantasy, fury and possible illegality. “The picture that the hearings depict is of a coup leader,” said the Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “This is a guy who was unwilling to accept defeat and was prepared to use virtually any means to try to stay illegally in power.”Levitsky is co-author of the influential book How Democracies Die which traces the collapse of once-proud democratic nations – in some cases through wrenching upheavals, but more often in modern times through a tip-toeing into authoritarianism. Levitsky is also an authority on Latin America, a region from which he draws a compelling parallel.Levitsky told the Guardian that the Trump who emerges from the hearings was a coup leader, “but not a very sophisticated one. Not a very experienced one. A petty autocrat. A type of leader more familiar to someone like me, a student of Latin American politics.”If Trump’s Latin American-style authoritarianism rang out from the hearings for scholars like Levitsky, a more vexed question is whether it similarly pierced the consciences of the wider American people. It is in their hands that the fate of the January 6 committee’s prime objective now rests: ensuring that a head-on assault on US democracy never happens again.The committee, led by its Democratic chair Bennie Thompson and rebel Republican vice-chair Liz Cheney, went to great lengths to make the hearings as digestible as possible for the TV, streaming and social media era. They employed the British journalist and former president of ABC News, James Goldston, to produce the events as tightly as a Netflix cliffhanger, which seems broadly, like a success.The opening primetime hearing on 9 June attracted at least 20m viewers, equivalent to the TV audience for a large sporting event. The following daytime sessions dipped to around 10m people, though ratings shot back up to almost 14m on 28 June when the former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson gave explosive testimony.It is one thing to preach to the millions of Americans who are already horrified by Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy, but what about those who went along with it and internalized his lies about the stolen election?Here the evidence is less comforting. When you enter the right-wing media bubble, the vision of a South American coup leader suddenly vanishes.Over on Fox News, the opening hearing was passed over in favor of the channel’s controversial star Tucker Carlson who used his show to ridicule the proceedings as “deranged propaganda” and to shrink the insurrection into “a forgettably minor outbreak”. On Thursday night, Carlson again supplanted live coverage of the closing hearing, going on a rant instead about Biden and Covid.The further into the right-wing media jungle you venture, the more the narrative becomes distorted. NewsGuard, a non-partisan firm that monitors misinformation, reviewed output during the period of the hearings from Newsmax, the hard-right TV channel that is still carried by most major cable and satellite providers.The monitors found Newsmax aired at least 40 false and misleading claims about the 2020 election and 6 January. Several of the falsehoods were pumped out even as the live hearings were proceeding.“If you were watching only Newsmax to get information about the January 6 hearings, you would likely be living in an entirely alternate universe,” said Jack Brewster, NewsGuard’s senior analyst.The media bubble is not the only barrier standing between the January 6 committee and a major repair of the country’s damaged democratic infrastructure. While the hearings focused heavily on the figure of Trump, Levitsky argues that an arguably even greater threat is now posed by the Republican party which enabled him.“In a two-party system, if one political party is not committed to democratic rules of the game, democracy is not likely to survive for very long,” Levitsky said. “The party has revealed itself, from top to bottom, to be a majority anti-democratic party.”Levitsky cites an analysis by the Republican Accountability Project, a group of anti-Trump conservatives, of the public statements made by all 261 Republicans in the US House and Senate in the wake of the 2020 election. It found that 224 of them – a staggering 86% of all Republicans in Congress – cast doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s win in what amounted to a mass “attack on a cornerstone of our democracy”.Levitsky warns that the hearings have illuminated two great dangers for America, both relating to Republicans. The first is that the party’s strategists have acquired through Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, a roadmap to the vulnerabilities of the electoral system.“They discovered that there is a plethora of opportunities for subverting an election, from blocking certification to sending alternate slates of electors to Congress. Armed with that knowledge, they may well do it much better next time.”The second lesson for Levitsky relates to accountability, or the lack of it. The Republicans who played with fire, openly backing the anti-democratic movement, found that they were largely immune to the consequences.“They learned that if you try to overturn the election you will not be punished by Republican voters, activists or donors. For the most part, you’ll be rewarded for it. And to me, that is terrifying.”Even now, at national level, the Republican leadership continues to stoke the flames. The minority leader of the House, Kevin McCarthy, and his top team have relentlessly striven to hinder and belittle the January 6 committee.But it is at state and local levels that the rot is most advanced. The watchdog States United Democracy Center calculates that at least 33 states are considering 229 bills that would give state legislatures the power to politicize, criminalize or otherwise tamper with elections. The group also notes that disciples of Trump’s stolen election lie are bidding for secretary of state positions in November in 17 states, which would give them, were they to win, control over election administration in a large swathe of the country.Several have already prevailed in Republican primaries, putting them one step away from being able to wreak havoc over the machinery of democracy. They include Jim Marchant in Nevada and Mark Finchem in Arizona, while in Pennsylvania a Stop the Steal peddler, Doug Mastriano, is vying to become governor which would similarly put him in the electoral driving seat.Then there is Kristina Karamo from the battleground state of Michigan who won the Republican nomination for secretary of state in April. Karamo has flirted with the baseless conspiracy theory QAnon and has accused singers Ariana Grande and Billie Eilish of putting children “under a satanic delusion”. She continues to be a fervent critic of Biden as an illegitimate president.Michigan’s current Democratic secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, who nursed the state through the traumatic contested count in 2020, is up for re-election and will go head-to-head with Karamo in the mid-terms. Benson told the Guardian that she sees the race as a test of the future for America, “between those who want to protect and defend democracy and those openly willing to deny it”.Benson’s plea is all the more urgent given signs that the willingness to embrace violence displayed on January 6 is also worming its way into the political fabric. A mega poll from UC Davis this week found that one in five adults in the US – which extrapolates to about 50 million people – believe that it can be justified to achieve your political aims through violence.Extremist groups have also stepped up their activities since the insurrection. Last month, the national chairman of the far-right Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, and several other top leaders were charged with seditious conspiracy. Yet the indictments do not appear to have discouraged the group from audaciously moving to infiltrate the Republicans – more than 10 current or former Proud Boys, for instance, now sit on the Republican party’s executive committee in Miami-Dade, Florida.So what does accountability look like in the wake of the hearings? How do you shore up democracy when even prosecutions appear to wield little power of persuasion?There was a lot of talk about accountability on Thursday night at the final hearing of this summer season. In his opening remarks Bennie Thompson, speaking by video link from Covid quarantine, said there had to be “stiff consequences for those responsible”.It required scant translation to see that as a direct invitation to Merrick Garland, the country’s top law enforcement official, to prosecute Trump. To pile pressure on the Department of Justice, Thompson announced that the committee was still receiving new intelligence and that there will be further public hearings in September.“There’s no doubt that the justice department has followed the hearings really closely,” said Daniel Zelenko, a partner at Crowell & Moring and a former federal prosecutor. “There’s going to be a lot of scrutiny and debate about a prosecution. But if you were ever going to indict a former president, it’s hard to imagine a more compelling fact pattern.”There is also the accountability of the ballot box. Cheney picked up that theme.“Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office,” she said in her closing remarks on Thursday. “Every American must consider this: can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of January 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDemocratsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      How the January 6 panel set the stage for a criminal case against Trump

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      How the January 6 panel set the stage for a criminal case against TrumpThe committee laid out evidence in a manner federal prosecutors could use as framework for potential prosecution The House January 6 select committee advanced new evidence at its Thursday primetime hearing that Donald Trump took active steps to obstruct the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election win, paving the way for prosecutors to construct a criminal case against the former president.‘It’s a kangaroo court’: in key state, Trump backers dismiss January 6 hearingsRead moreThe former president knew as early as 15 mins after returning to the White House from his rally at the Ellipse that the US Capitol was under attack by his supporters, and yet acted only to find ways to stop the certification by calling senators to make objections, the panel showed.And when Trump finally sent a tweet instructing the rioters to leave the Capitol, it was 4.17pm, only after it had become clear they had been unable to fully occupy the building after being repulsed by a late-arriving national guard and the Capitol attack had largely failed.Those deliberate actions to first advance the obstruction, and then refuse to intervene until the attack was essentially over, bolstered the case that Trump violated federal law that prohibits obstructing an official proceeding, through both action and inaction.Elaine Luria, the select committee member who co-led Thursday’s hearing, concluded: “In the end, this is not a story of inaction in time of crisis. It was the final action of Donald Trump’s own plan to usurp the will of the American people and remain in power.”The select committee, in effect, at the primetime hearing laid out the evidence of obstruction of an official proceeding – a violation of federal law – in such a manner that justice department prosecutors could take up their presentation as a framework for a potential prosecution.Aside from presenting new details of the former president’s actions on January 6, the panel also revealed new and potentially legally significant details about Trump’s frame of mind that the members believe revealed his intent and understanding of what had taken place that day.The select committee notably focused on a tweet that Trump sent at 6.01pm, after the attack was largely over, referring to his lie that he had won the 2020 election, that read: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously and viciously stripped away.”Playing a clip from a deposition with Trump’s close aide Nicholas Luna, the select committee revealed that Luna had suggested that Trump might consider revising that first part of the tweet because it read to him as though Trump was responsible for the Capitol attack.Luna testified that he had told Trump the language “would lead some to believe that potentially he had something to do with the events that happened at the Capitol”.Trump did not revise the tweet, and the select committee appeared to raise the extraordinary situation that the former president did not dispute that assessment that he had something to do with the Capitol attack and therefore saw no reason to change the phrasing.The episode is significant since it came immediately after the crisis at the Capitol, which Trump had been watching live on television, as had millions of shocked Americans. Insight into Trump’s frame of mind would be an important consideration for any criminal case.Within three days, Trump’s stance had shifted from apparently not caring that he might be perceived as having a role in the events of January 6, to refusing to even discuss in a video address from the White House the attack or the US Capitol police officers who died.The reversal was noted by Trump’s former campaign chairman, Tim Murtaugh, in a text to a Trump campaign press aide, Matthew Wolking, that the select committee showed.“He’d be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won’t do that, because they’re his people. And he would be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault,” Murtaugh said.From an investigative perspective, the select committee also raised the pattern of crucial missing evidence from January 6, which members and investigators on the panel increasingly see as malfeasance, according to two sources close to the inquiry.The primetime hearing on Thursday – the final one of the summer before further hearings in September – for the large part ran through how Trump chose not to act while ensconced in the White House watching Fox News as the violence at the Capitol unfolded two miles away down Pennsylvania Avenue.In order to reconstruct his actions, the select committee showed it had attempted to rely on the presidential daily diary, the presidential call logs and official photos taken by the White House photographer that day.But the panel revealed that none of those records existed for the crucial 187 minutes of the Capitol attack. The daily diary lacked entries, hours’ worth of call logs were missing and the White House photographer had been told to take no pictures during that time.The missing records fit a pattern of evidence loss, the select committee indicated: the text messages among Secret Service agents on the presidential security detail that day were erased 11 days after Congress requested the communications in January last year.TopicsUS newsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      January 6 panel says Bannon conviction is a ‘victory for the rule of law’ – live

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      A Washington jury has found Steve Bannon guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress after the former adviser to Donald Trump refused to cooperate with a subpoena from the January 6 committee.BREAKING: Steve Bannon GUILTY on both counts. https://t.co/apLhOX2dia— Ryan J. Reilly (@ryanjreilly) July 22, 2022
      In its latest attempt to stop gun violence, California’s Democratic leadership has taken inspiration from anti-abortion legislation first crafted in conservative Texas, the Associated Press reports:California punched back Friday against two recent landmark US supreme court decisions as the state’s governor signed a controversial, first-in-the-nation gun control law patterned after a Texas anti-abortion law.The action by Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, comes one month after conservative justices overturned women’s constitutional right to abortions and undermined gun control laws in states including California.Newsom stitched the two hot-button topics together in approving a law allowing people to sue anyone who distributes illegal assault weapons, parts that can be used to build weapons, guns without serial numbers, or .50 caliber rifles. They would be awarded at least $10,000 in civil damages for each weapon, plus attorneys fees.California signs gun control law modeled after Texas anti-abortion measureRead moreExpect to hear more from Steven Bannon about his contempt of Congress conviction, including in an interview with conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson this evening, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reports: Hearing that Steve Bannon will return to hosting War Room podcast tonight at 5p ET and then appear on Tucker Carlson’s show on Fox News at 8p ET to discuss his conviction for contempt of Congress.— Hugo Lowell (@hugolowell) July 22, 2022
      Speaking to reporters after his conviction, Steve Bannon declared, “We may have lost a battle today, but we’re not going to lose this war.” He added, “I stand with Trump, and the constitution.”He also attacked the House panel investigating the January 6 attack as “gutless members of that show-trial committee” who “didn’t have the guts to testify in open court”.You can watch video of his remarks below:Steve Bannon, a longtime ally of former President Donald Trump, was convicted on Friday of contempt charges for defying a congressional subpoena from the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. https://t.co/ehJpCqr64t pic.twitter.com/W1L4uFcu3r— The Associated Press (@AP) July 22, 2022
      Bennie Thomspon, the Democratic chair of the January 6 committee, and Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair, have released a statement applauding the conviction this afternoon of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon for defying the committee’s subpoenas.“The conviction of Steve Bannon is a victory for the rule of law and an important affirmation of the Select Committee’s work,” Thompson and Cheney said.“As the prosecutor stated, Steve Bannon ‘chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law’. Just as there must be accountability for all those responsible for the events of January 6th, anyone who obstructs our investigation into these matters should face consequences. No one is above the law.”Steve Bannon convicted of contempt of Congress for defying Capitol attack subpoenaRead moreThe Secret Service has just put out a statement reaffirming its willingness to cooperate with the January 6 committee, amid an ongoing investigation over its deletion of text messages from around the time of the insurrection.“As an American and director of this incredible agency, I found the events at the Capitol on January 6th to be abhorrent. What happened on that day in January 2021 is anathema to democracy and the processes our constitution guarantees,” Secret Service director James Murray said. “Since day one, I have directed our personnel to cooperate fully and completely with the committee and we are currently finalizing dates and times for our personnel to make themselves available to the committee for follow up inquiries.”Separately, CNN reports that Adam Kinzinger, a Republican lawmaker serving on the committee, said that Donald Trump’s former deputy chief of staff and the former head of his Secret Service detail have stopped cooperating with the inquiry.I asked @RepKinzinger if he believes Trump’s fmr Dep Chief of Staff Tony Ornato and fmr Secret Service lead agent Robert Engel are still cooperating with the Jan 6 Cmte. His answer was a hard “No.”— Jim Sciutto (@jimsciutto) July 22, 2022
      Secret Service told to begin an inquiry into erased January 6 text messagesRead moreJean-Pierre didn’t have much to say about Steve Bannon’s conviction earlier this afternoon on contempt of Congress charges for defying subpoenas from the January 6 committee.“I’m not going to comment specifically on that case, but obviously, everyone should cooperate with the January 6 committee,” she told reporters.The White House has identified 17 close contacts of President Joe Biden, who tested positive for Covid-19 yesterday.Speaking at a briefing to reporters, press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the group members have all been informed, but none has tested positive.“The White House medical unit has identified and informed 17 people determined to be close contacts of the president, including members of his senior staff. None of the staff members have tested positive to date, and all of them are wearing masks around other people,” Jean-Pierre said.President Joe Biden has appeared at a White House event – virtually, due to his Covid-19 infection.“I feel much better than I sound,” he said, flashing a thumbs-up and smiling on-screen.He didn’t have much more to say about that, but the event is focusing on gas prices, which are declining nationally from their record high levels hit last month, according to GasBuddy’s Patrick De Haan:37 days in a row: #gasprices keep falling, the national average ⬇️ 2.2c to $4.419/gal. We’re likely to fall to $4.399/gal by late today. 8 states under $4: TX, SC, GA, MS, LA, AL, TN, & AR. 35k stations More

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      January 6 hearings: Trump ‘chose not to act’ during Capitol attack, Kinzinger says – live

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      Today, the Republican party remains by and large the domain of Donald Trump. He still leads in polls of potential candidates in the next election, and House Republican leadership routinely criticizes the January 6 committee.Last night’s hearing was however full of reminders that top Republicans appeared ready to break with Trump during and immediately after the insurrection – or at least were terrified by it. Case in point: the much-mocked video footage of rightwing senator Josh Hawley fleeing through the halls of the Capitol as the protesters he greeted as he walked in overwhelmed police.Then there was Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the party in the House of Representatives who could be the chamber’s next speaker, should Republicans gain seats in November’s midterms. The committee last night showed that he pleaded with Trump as the insurrection was ongoing to call off the mob – which the president refused to do. Viewers also saw a repeat of his floor speech seven days after the attack, where he pinned the blame squarely on Trump.Days later, McCarthy went to Florida, where he met with the former president and appeared in a picture beside him that is now seen as having been key to reviving Trump’s standing among the party.“The mob was accomplishing president Trump’s purpose. So of course he didn’t intervene.”That was how Adam Kinzinger, one of two Republicans on the January 6 committee, summed up what the panel uncovered last night. His statement near the start of the hearing was followed by testimony from two former White House officials present in the room and video clips from the lawmakers’ interviews with former White House officials, including attorney Pat Cipollone.“What explains President Trump’s behavior. Why did he not take immediate action in a time of crisis?” Kinzinger asked. “Because president Trump’s plan for January 6 was to halt or delay Congress’s official proceeding to count the votes. The mob… attacking the Capitol quickly caused the evacuation of both the House and the Senate. The count ground to an absolute halt and was ultimately delayed for hours.”The committee won’t host another hearing until sometime in September, and plans to use the coming weeks to continue their investigation. As the committee vice-chair Liz Cheney put it last night: “Doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued and the dam has begun to break.”As the January 6 committee was airing evidence, Andrew Lawrence entered an alternate universe, just by watching Fox News:On Thursday night as the Congressional hearings into the January 6 Capitol riot drew to a close, Tucker Carlson directed his outrage at a president he felt had lied and was not being held accountable for falsehoods that shook popular faith in the American democratic system. But he wasn’t talking about Donald Trump inciting rioters to storm the Capitol. He was talking about Joe Biden getting Covid.Whilemillions of people last night tuned into America’s other TV news channels and heard testimony about what Trump did, or rather did not do, during the hours when the rioters stormed the Capitol, Fox News viewers saw the network’s primetime stars Carlson and Sean Hannity chide the “twice jabbed, double-boosted” president for contracting the virus they say he alleged couldn’t be caught with a vaccine.As the US watched the January 6 hearing, Fox News showed outrage – at Biden getting CovidRead moreSteve Bannon is one of the many Trump associates whose comments were shown by the January 6 committee last night, but he may be the only one currently embroiled in active criminal trial.In fact, the charges he’s facing center around his defiance of a subpoena from the committee, and both sides are today expected to finish making their cases before a jury. Politico reports that Bannon’s legal team wants to question the jury about whether they watched last night’s hearing.HAPPENING SOON: Bannon returns to court just hours after the Jan. 6 select committee featured him prominently at the close of their hearing. The case is expected to go to the jury today but I’m anticipating some discussion about whether jurors may have watched.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 22, 2022
      As expected, BANNON team raises his mention in last night’s hearing as a potential problem for the jury. Here’s a filing that just arrived: pic.twitter.com/5WdvxXPzM1— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 22, 2022
      BANNON wants judge to question jury:”The Defendant respectfully requests…that there should be some inquiry, while assuring the jurors of the importance of candor and that they will not suffer negative consequences if they acknowledge exposure to the broadcast or its subject.”— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 22, 2022
      Closing arguments in the case are now underway:UPDATE: Closing arguments are now underway. Judge Nichols has already instructed the jurors, so they’ll begin deliberating as soon as this is over. Expect they’ll be deliberating by 11-11:30 a.m.— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) July 22, 2022
      Steve Bannon appears in court as contempt-of-Congress trial beginsRead moreThe Guardian’s David Smith was in the room last night as the January 6 committee conducted what some are calling its “season finale”:They did it. They pulled it off. Anyone who feared that the January 6 committee’s season finale would turn into an anti-climax – more Game of Thrones than M*A*S*H – need not have worried. There were shocks, horrors and even laughs.The eight “episodes” have exceeded all expectations with their crisp narrative and sharp editing, a far cry from the usual dry proceedings on Capitol Hill. Each has recapped what came before, teased what is to come and compellingly joined the dots against Donald Trump.Much of the credit must go to James Goldston, the former president of ABC News, who was brought in to help produce the hearings like a true crime series. Give that man an Emmy (if only to infuriate Trump, a TV obsessive).Hearing delivers gripping ‘finale’ full of damning details about TrumpRead moreToday, the Republican party remains by and large the domain of Donald Trump. He still leads in polls of potential candidates in the next election, and House Republican leadership routinely criticizes the January 6 committee.Last night’s hearing was however full of reminders that top Republicans appeared ready to break with Trump during and immediately after the insurrection – or at least were terrified by it. Case in point: the much-mocked video footage of rightwing senator Josh Hawley fleeing through the halls of the Capitol as the protesters he greeted as he walked in overwhelmed police.Then there was Kevin McCarthy, the leader of the party in the House of Representatives who could be the chamber’s next speaker, should Republicans gain seats in November’s midterms. The committee last night showed that he pleaded with Trump as the insurrection was ongoing to call off the mob – which the president refused to do. Viewers also saw a repeat of his floor speech seven days after the attack, where he pinned the blame squarely on Trump.Days later, McCarthy went to Florida, where he met with the former president and appeared in a picture beside him that is now seen as having been key to reviving Trump’s standing among the party.Good morning, US politics blog readers. Last night, the January 6 committee wrapped up its first weeks of hearings by airing evidence that showed Donald Trump resisted efforts to forcefully condemn the rioters who broke into the Capitol that day, despite the pleas of top White House officials and his own family members to do so. As Congressman Adam Kinzinger put it: “President Trump did not fail to act during the 187 minutes between leaving the Ellipse and telling the mob to go home. He chose not to act.” Expect the aftershocks from those revelations to wash through Washington today.Here’s what else is happening today:
      Trump speaks at an Arizona rally for candidates in the state he has endorsed, which kicks off at 4 pm eastern time.
      The trial of Steve Bannon, a former top advisor to Trump who featured in last night’s hearing, continues over contempt of Congress charges.
      Congress is still negotiating over a bunch of legislation, including measures to boost American competitiveness, codify same-sex marriage rights and lower prescription drug and health care costs. More

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      House panel showed Trump conspired to seize the election – but was it illegal?

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      House panel showed Trump conspired to seize the election – but was it illegal?Panel lays out its case that the 45th president orchestrated a plot to keep himself in office, but its work is not done During the course of its landmark summer of hearings, the House select committee investigating the deadly insurrection at the US Capitol has sought to show that Donald Trump was at the center of a multi-layer conspiracy to seize a second term in office, accusing him of having “summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack”.Then, for 187 minutes on 6 January, the president let the firestorm he ignited burn, the panel argued in a gripping capstone presentation on Thursday.In its final midsummer hearing, one of its most dramatic of the series of eight, the panel argued that Trump betrayed his oath of office and was derelict in his duty when he refused to condemn the violence as rioters carrying poles, bear spray and the banners of his campaign, led a bloody assault on the US Capitol.House panel says Trump ‘chose not to act’ during attack on US CapitolRead moreThe primetime session recounted in harrowing, minute-by-minute detail the siege of the Capitol, while simultaneously laying out the actions Trump did – but mostly deliberately did not – take during those excruciating hours when “lives and our democracy hung in the balance,” as Congresswoman Elaine Luria, a Democrat of Virginia and a member of the committee, described it on Thursday.Amid the chaos at the Capitol, Trump was idle in the White House, watching it all unfold on a television tuned to Fox News. Even 24 hours later, Trump refused to say the election was over.Trump’s abdication of leadership on 6 January was a “stain on our history”, Congressman Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois and a committee member, said Thursday.But were his actions illegal? It’s a question at the heart of the committee’s yearlong inquiry.Over the course of the public hearings, the panel has sought to lay out the case that Trump orchestrated a multilayered plot to seize another term in office despite being told repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that his myth of a stolen election was baseless.07:50Culling from hundreds of thousands of documents and hundreds of interviews, the committee showed that Trump, having been turned back by the courts at every level, became increasingly desperate in his bid to overturn the results of an election his own attorney general deemed free and fair.The panel has sought to offer a full public accounting of the events of 6 January for the American people and for the historical record.Its work, however, is not done. The vice-chair, Liz Cheney, a Republican of Wyoming, said that the committee will spend August “pursuing and merging information”, which continues to come in, before reconvening for more hearings in September.While the committee originally set a September deadline for releasing a final report on their investigation, lawmakers now say it will only release a preliminary report by then, and a full report by the end of the year. The committee must release a full report before it disbands, which it is set to do with the start of a new Congress in early January.The committee’s report is already getting treatment similar to other major investigations such as Watergate and 9/11. Multiple publishers, including Hachette and MacMillan, have books coming out in September related to the committee’s findings.But already, the committee has presented evidence that lawmakers and aides have suggested could be used as a foundation for bringing a criminal case against the former president. Among the possible charges that have been discussed are conspiracy to defraud the American people and obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. The committee has also raised the prospect of witness tampering, announcing at its last hearing that Trump had attempted to contact a witness cooperating with its investigation.“The facts are clear and unambiguous,” Thompson said on Thursday.The Justice Department is pursuing a separate investigation into the breach of the Capitol.A federal judge has said Trump “more likely than not” committed federal crimes in his efforts to delay or disrupt the congressional count of electoral college votes on January 6.But legal experts are divided over whether the evidence shown during the hearings is enough to charge Trump. No former president has ever been prosecuted by the justice department. And in this era of polarization, there are risks that both charging Trump – or declining to do so – could further undermine Americans faith in their system of justice.The attorney general, Merrick Garland, under immense pressure by Democrats to act, has not said whether he is considering a case against Trump.“No person is above the law in this country,” he said Wednesday. “I can’t say it any more clearly than that.”Trump has dismissed the panel’s inquiry as politically motivated and a witch hunt. Perhaps the panel’s most urgent work is to show Americans that the “forces Donald Trump ignited that day have not gone away”, Kinzinger said. “The militant, intolerant ideologies. The militias. The alienation and the disaffection. The weird fantasies and disinformation. They’re all still out there, ready to go.”Millions of voters still believe the conspiracy that Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. It has galvanized a new wave of Republican candidates, who openly embrace the lie that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Many are now their party’s nominee for critical positions such as governor and secretary of state.Trump was impeached for actions on 6 January, but the Senate acquitted and never attempted to bar him from holding future public office. Cheney suggested Thursday that if what was known now about Trump’s role in the tangled, brazen plot to keep him in office, the Senate may have voted differently. But the opportunity for political accountability is not presently available – Trump is out of office, for now.That is why many, including members of the committee, believe Trump must face consequences for his actions.“If there’s no accountability for January 6, for every part of this scheme, I fear we will not overcome the ongoing threat to our democracy,” Thompson warned. “There must be stiff consequences for those responsible.”
      This article was amended on 22 July 2022. Liz Cheney is a Republican member for Wyoming, not Wisconsin as an earlier version said.
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      Bannon trial set for closing arguments after defense doesn’t call witnesses

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      Bannon trial set for closing arguments after defense doesn’t call witnessesFederal prosectors to make final pitch to convict Trump’s ex-adviser on charges of contempt of Congress for defying subpoena Federal prosecutors are due to make their final pitch to jurors on Friday to convict Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former presidential adviser, on charges of contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena by the committee investigating last year’s attack on the US Capitol by supporters of the-then president as they sought to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden.The prosecution and defense are expected to deliver closing arguments to the 12-member jury in federal court, with deliberations expected to begin afterward.House panel showed Trump conspired to seize the election – but was it illegal?Read moreThe defense rested its case on Thursday without calling any witnesses after the prosecution rested on Wednesday, having called two witnesses over two days.Bannon, 68, has pleaded not guilty to two misdemeanor counts after rebuffing the House of Representative select committee’s subpoena requesting testimony and documents as part of its inquiry into the January 6, 2021, rampage by Trump supporters trying to stop the US Congress officially certifying Democrat Biden’s win over Republican Trump.Bannon had promised in out-of-court bluster to fight his case vigorously and make it the “misdemeanor from hell” for the authorities, but he ultimately made no presentation to the court, as the Daily Beast reported.Prosecutors said they expect their arguments on Friday to last about 30 minutes, plus 15 for rebuttal. The defense said it plans to take roughly the same amount of time to make its arguments.Bannon was barred from arguing that he believed his communications with Trump were subject to a legal doctrine called executive privilege that can keep certain presidential communications confidential. The judge also prohibited Bannon from arguing that he relied on legal advice from an attorney in refusing to comply with the congressional subpoena.Bannon’s primary defense in the trial was that he believed the subpoena’s deadline dates were flexible and subject to negotiation between his attorney and the committee.The main prosecution witness was Kristin Amerling, a senior committee staff member. She testified on Wednesday that Bannon disregarded the subpoena’s two deadlines, sought no extensions and offered an invalid rationale for his defiance – a claim by Trump involving a legal doctrine called executive privilege that can keep certain presidential communications confidential.Bannon has spoken only once in court throughout the trial. He said: “Yes, your honor,” when the judge asked if he agreed not to testify.Outside court on Thursday, Bannon said: “One last thing. I stand with Trump and the constitution.”TopicsSteve BannonJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      The real story of January 6 isn’t what Trump did – it’s what he didn’t | Moira Donegan

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      The real story of January 6 isn’t what Trump did – it’s what he didn’tMoira DoneganWhat was Trump doing in those crucial hours when democracy was on the line, when lives were in danger, when our very constitutional system of government hung in the balance? Absolutely nothing For what was originally supposed to be the final January 6 hearing, the committee was faced with a difficult task. The ninth broadcast was meant to be the culmination of the investigation, with a primetime schedule that would allow the congresspeople to review their findings, repeat their sharpest analyses of Donald Trump’s legal violations and moral derelictions, and make their final case to their two most significant audiences – the American public, on the one hand, and the attorney general, Merrick Garland, on the other – that Trump’s conduct on and before January 6 merits prosecution.But they were also meant to do all of this through revelations of Trump’s own conduct at the White House in the hours while the riot unfolded, conduct that was remarkable not for Trump’s scheming but for his inaction. What was Trump doing during those crucial hours when democracy was on the line, when violence erupted, when lives were in danger and our very constitutional system of government hung in the balance? He did not intervene to stop the insurrection; he did not issue orders or offer help to the military and law enforcement bodies that could have quelled it. Mostly, he just sat on his ass.Trump’s unwillingness to act is itself damning, of course, but it presented a problem for the committee in that it doesn’t make for compelling TV. For all their political gravity, the January 6 committee hearings derive much of their power from spectacle, high production values, and their capacity to engage and entertain. But the negligence, inertia, passivity that Trump showed in those hours – these things have no plot.But the committee’s presentation made swift work of highlighting the stakes of Trump’s refusal to call off the mob. Trump spent the hours of the insurrection mostly holed up in a West Wing dining room, watching Fox News’ coverage of the unfolding violence on a TV mounted to a wall. During these hours, we know that Trump made calls to several Republican senators, asking the likes of Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville to stop the election certification even as he was evacuating the Capitol to escape the mob. We know he received calls from Republican congressmen like minority leader Kevin McCarthy, who begged and screamed at Trump to call off the mob while McCarthy and his aides cowered in hiding. We know he got pleas and lectures from the likes of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who in taped testimony seemed livid and contemptuous of his former client, and described himself as one of many advisers imploring Trump to call off the murderous crowds that by then were roaming the Capitol halls in search of Mike Pence.In previous hearings, the committee had been exceedingly generous toward Republicans, casting Pence as a hero for merely declining to facilitate a coup, repeatedly praising the courage of testifying Republicans who have aided Trump’s other crimes and the beauty and integrity of the very institutions whose failures led to January 6 itself. But Thursday’s hearing was a departure from previous installments in that it was willing to hold other Republicans to account, or at least to ridicule their hypocrisy.The committee members made repeated references to the evident terror of Kevin McCarthy, the Republicans’ House leader, who has since made a great effort to bring Trump back into the party fold. They repeatedly played clips of Mitch McConnell, who has said he would support Trump again in 2024, blaming the former president for the attack. They showed an infamous photo of Missouri senator Josh Hawley raising a fist in encouragement to the insurrectionist mob, and then they showed security footage from the Capitol after the rioters invaded. Hawley – the author of Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs – could be seen running frantically away.Placed in the context of all this fear and anger from the men who had spent so long serving him and courting his approval, Trump’s refusal to act transforms. It becomes visible not as a passive failure but as a willful choice. All around him, in his presence and through his phone, people who had been his most dependable sycophants for years were pleading with him to act, explaining that the country, and many human lives, were at stake. Knowing this, it is difficult to see Trump’s refusal to act as any of the things that his malfeasances are normally excused as – incompetence, or childlike narcissism, or low-stakes petulance. His actions come to seem not merely mendacious, but sadistic.Yet Thursday night’s hearing also did a great deal to puncture the mystique of showmanship that has surrounded Trump. In archival clips, we saw outtakes of his Rose Garden video from late on the afternoon of the 6th, the one where, after it was clear that his coup attempt would fail, he finally told the mob that he loved them, and to go home. In the footage, Trump hesitates to speak, repeatedly asking an offscreen aide when he should start. He glowers at his own image on a camera screen; he dispenses with his scripted remarks to deliver a weird, rambling, and barely comprehensible missive to his followers.In outtakes from a speech he taped the next morning, after the crowd had gone home, he stutters over his words and petulantly nitpicks the script. Damningly, he refuses to say that the election is over; the line gets cut from his remarks.But the footage is most striking because of how bumbling and small Trump looks, how starkly his own peevishness and intellectual vacuity contrasts with the moral weight of what he has done. He fumbles his words, unable to speak clearly. He bangs on the podium in frustration; he can’t pronounce “yesterday.” “Yesterday is a hard word for me,” he says. And later, “Is it defied or defiled?” Maybe it’s both.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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