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      The January 6 hearings aren’t acknowledging the elephant in the room | Thomas Zimmer

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      The January 6 hearings aren’t acknowledging the elephant in the roomThomas ZimmerThe attack on the US Capitol wasn’t the isolated doing of Trump and a few loyalists. Nearly the entire Republican party is now united behind it – and the attack on democracy hasn’t ended The January 6 hearings have been more impressive and more forceful than anyone could have reasonably expected – definitely worthy of the nation’s continued prime-time attention. Yet so far the hearings have been narrowly focused on Donald Trump and the past – rather than the continuing assault on the democratic system that the Republican party has fully embraced.The committee’s core task is to investigate the January 6 attack on the US Capitol and what led to it, of course. But everyone who believes in democracy needs to recognize that, in a very concrete sense, there is a continuing insurrection that far surpasses Trump.Man who attacked Capitol was given tour of building by Republican day before riotRead moreThe committee’s strategy of building its case almost entirely on testimony from Trump people, Republicans, and conservatives, not Democrats, is certainly effective if the goal is to prove the nonpartisan nature of the proceedings. But it runs the risk of letting too many people besides Trump off the hook. The narrative is that there was a “Team Normal” in and around the White House that moved away from Trump as he went increasingly off the rails, isolating him and leaving him with only “Team Crazy” and the likes of an allegedly drunk Rudy Giuliani, a rather unhinged Sidney Powell, and a rightwing lawyer, John Eastman, who seemed entirely willing to invent pseudo-legal reasons to justify a coup attempt.It is important to get insight into these inner dynamics. But the group of people who were deeply complicit in Trump’s machinations is a lot bigger than Team Crazy. A tale that presents not only Mike Pence, but also former attorney general William Barr, Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien, and even Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, undoubtedly members of Trump’s innermost circle, as part of Team Good Guys (or at least: Team Normal, Team Reasonable) is problematic. All of them stood with Trump almost to the bitter end and fought long and hard to keep him in charge; Pence undoubtedly played a crucial role in thwarting Trump’s scheme, but none of the others spoke out publicly until, in the case of Barr, they had a revelatory book to promote and were looking for redemption.Most worrisome, to me, is the fact that the “Team Crazy was isolated” narrative doesn’t really capture the danger of the moment. If that had been the case, we wouldn’t be where we are. If anything, Republicans have actually rallied around Team Trump. So far, the villains in the committee’s tale are Trump, a very small number of unhinged people around him, and fascistic militants like the Proud Boys. Even most of the people who stormed the Capitol are presented as deluded, deceived by Trump’s lies into believing the election was stolen and that it was their patriotic duty to fight back.These are all important parts of the puzzle. But the immediate danger to American democracy stems from the fact that the Republican party is justifying all this, remains united behind the man responsible, and, worst of all, actually wants to put him back in power. This is about Trump, but not just about Trump. This is what the Republican party is: the very few voices siding against Trumpism are being shunned and ostracized, and most Republicans are united in their quest to install authoritarian rule by a reactionary minority.And even if conservatives aren’t necessarily on board with all the specifics of Trump’s conspiracy claims, the right in general is united behind the idea that progressives are out to destroy “real” America and must be stopped by whatever means. White conservatives consider themselves the sole proponents of “real America” and therefore entitled to rule, as is the party that focuses almost solely on their interests and sensibilities.This is the basis on which 147 congressional Republicans voted to overturn the election results even after the assault on the Capitol. This is why the Republican party officially defended the violent attack of January 6 as “legitimate political discourse” and lashed out against the few Republicans who publicly dared to object. This is why Republicans are either explicitly running on the big lie or, at the very least, are lending legitimacy to the idea that there was something wrong with the 2020 election.This is, most importantly, the ideology that animates Republicans up and down the country to look at January 6 as what one of the witnesses in the third hearing, conservative Judge J Michael Luttig, rightfully called a “blueprint” in his closing statement: a trial run for the next presidential election in 2024. They are working hard at the state level to get themselves in a position to execute that blueprint more effectively. They have escalated their election subversion efforts into an all-out assault on state election systems. Republican-led state legislatures are re-writing the rules so that they will have more influence on future elections. Local officials who defended the democratic process are being harassed, purged from election commissions, and replaced with loyal Trumpists.And how are the people the hearings present as Team Normal, as standing up to Trump’s coup attempt, dealing with all this? Take Bill Barr: he’s on record saying he would vote for Trump in 2024. In his testimony for the committee as well as in his book, Barr has left no doubt that he believes Trump is either willfully pushing treasonous conspiracy theories or is completely detached from reality – yet Barr is still willing to help put him back in the White House.Barr’s ability to rationalize this astonishing balancing act is the main reason I am skeptical that the hearings, by focusing narrowly on Trump, could succeed at turning Republicans away from him. When confronted with how he could possibly still support another Trump presidency during his book promotion tour earlier this year, Barr replied: “Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic party.” There it is: after everything we have been through, conservatives still see the Democrats (or progressives, or liberals, or the left – they see them as interchangeable) as the biggest threat.This is the perfect encapsulation of the permission structure that governs conservative politics: anything is justified in defense against what they constantly play up as a radically “un-American,” extremist “left” that has supposedly taken over the Democratic party. What could the hearings possibly deliver – considering that much of Trump’s involvement in the insurrection happened out in the open, in plain sight – that the right hasn’t either already mythologized as part of a fully justified struggle to protect “real America” against a fundamentally illegitimate “left,” or, at the very least, is willing to endorse as the lesser evil? If someone is still on Team Trump in June 2022 – and that includes all those who would love to present themselves as “Team Normal” but are willing to put Trump back in power – we should assume they have found an effective way of giving themselves permission to stay on Team Trump no matter what, Bill Barr style, and to side with the radicalizing Republican party against democracy.We need to acknowledge that that’s where Republicans are: they either subscribe to the big lie outright; or they feel queasy about the specifics of the big lie, but consider Democratic governance illegitimate nonetheless; or, at the very least, they think anything is justified to defeat “the left”. The committee needs to communicate this unsettling reality to the American people, because that, in Judge Luttig’s words, is the “clear and present danger to American democracy.” Even if it initially failed, that’s how Trump’s coup attempt might still succeed. In 2020, the historian Heather Cox Richardson published a book on How the South Won the Civil War. It should be required reading for this particular moment in American politics. Richardson argues that while the Confederacy obviously lost the military confrontation, the broader ideology it was built on, the idea that the world works best when it is dominated by wealthy white men, and that only those wealthy white men are therefore entitled to rule, continued to shape the American project, and is still the leading threat to true democracy in this country today. I worry, to build on the title of Richardson’s book, that future historians might have to write about How the Insurrectionists Won the Presidency.
      Thomas Zimmer is a visiting professor at Georgetown University, focused on the history of democracy and its discontents in the United States, and a Guardian US contributing opinion writer
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      Did ‘good’ Republicans save us from the ‘bad’ ones on January 6? I don’t buy it | Moira Donegan

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      Did ‘good’ Republicans save us from the ‘bad’ ones on January 6? I don’t buy itMoira DoneganA person of integrity wouldn’t have found himself in the position that Mike Pence was in on the day of the Capitol attack, because he would have stood up to Trump sooner – or never worked for him in the first place Who is the January 6 committee talking to? Over the past week, the committee has held three public hearings that offer a lucid, convincing and thorough account of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the events leading up to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. The hearings have been choreographed and precise, scripted down to the word, building a clear case that Trump intentionally broke the law in the pursuit of perpetual power. The hearings, compelling as argument and surprisingly successful as television, betray a vision and discipline that is rare in congressional proceedings, and which would have been impossible if it were not for the absence of nearly all Republicans on the panel.Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’, January 6 panel saysRead moreAnd yet, over the course of the committee’s three hearings to date, viewers have heard almost exclusively from Republicans. The public presentation of the committee’s findings relies heavily on videotaped depositions from members of the Trump campaign and the Trump administration. During the hearings’ opening night, last week, we heard from a montage of Trump-world figures, who testified under oath that they knew the 2020 election had been fairly conducted even as Trump told the public that it was stolen. It was two on-the-ground witnesses to the violence, a Capitol police officer and a British documentarian, who spoke about how brutal and chaotic the scene at the Capitol was. When it was the committee’s turn to characterize their findings, it was Liz Cheney – a rightwing ideologue from Wyoming – who did most of the talking.On Tuesday, the committee’s presentation focused on how Trump loyalists searched for evidence of election fraud, with campaign attorneys and justice department staff investigating every implausible account of irregularity that crossed the president’s desk – from fairy tales of a leaking pipe and mysterious suitcases in Atlanta – to darker conspiracies about nefarious functionaries in Philadelphia. These allegations were all investigated with surprising seriousness, and they were all found to be baseless, even by inquisitors who were sympathetic to Trump’s authoritarian cause. Trump and his allies pressed the false fraud claims anyway. Here, too, the committee used only Republicans’ testimony, giving Trump and his insurrectionist faction just enough rope to hang themselves.In the story the January 6 committee is telling about the attempted coup and its violent climax, Republicans are the bad guys and Republicans are also the good guys. The Republicans are the ones who plotted a coup, searched for a legal rationale, invented lies about fraud and wasted taxpayer money investigating them, and then descended on the Capitol in a mob. But it was also Republicans who privately said the election was fair, who told the president the election fraud claims were lies, and who frantically texted the White House as violence erupted and people started getting killed, asking Trump to call the whole thing off.It’s not a plausible story: the idea that the Republican party are both the heroes and the villains of January 6; that their private, whispered discomfort and hasty condemnations of violence should excuse their cooperation and complicity all the way up to 5 January. It’s particularly implausible now, a year and a half after the attack, as Republicans who once distanced themselves from the January 6 mob have moved to embrace it. But that’s the story that the committee is telling.They kept on telling it on Thursday, as they presented extensive and disturbing evidence about the increasingly threatening attempts by Trump and his fringe campaign lawyer, John Eastman, to persuade Pence to refuse to certify the election results. The Committee heard from two rightwing legal experts: Pence’s in-house legal advisor, Greg Jacob, who was with the vice-president at the Capitol on January 6 and counseled him in the weeks proceeding; and the former federal judge John Michael Luttig, a jurist with considerable respect in rightwing legal circles, for whom John Eastman once worked as a clerk.The two men clearly enjoyed hearing themselves talk, and their testimony featured some tedious and indulgent bickering over the supposed “inartfulness” or “perfection” of the 12th amendment’s language. But together, they told a story of an alarming campaign of pressure on the vice-president to either reject electoral votes for Biden outright, or to suspend Congress’ joint session in order to allow time for the votes to be “re-certified” (ie, changed) by state legislatures.It was Eastman who invented this cockamamie scheme, claiming without precedent or any legal support that the vice-president had the authority to change the results of an election unilaterally. The Pence camp searched desperately for some way that the plan could be legal, only to find none. For weeks, Pence and his advisors were caught in a pickle – not wanting to concede the election or disappoint Trump, but also too scared to get implicated in a treasonously hairbrained scheme. The Pence camp told Trump and Eastman that the plan was illegal. According to testimony, so did the White House counsel. So did everyone. At certain points, according to Jacob, both Eastman and Giuliani admitted that the scheme had no legal basis. They kept pushing it anyway.Things escalated. Trump began to make public attacks on Pence on Twitter. The vice-president’s office talked to the Secret Service before January 6, concerned that Trump’s hostility would mean that Pence would need more security. On a phone call the morning of the attack, Trump called Pence a “wimp” and a “pussy.” Members of the White House staff testified that even after Trump had been made aware of violence at the Capitol, he sent out another tweet attacking Pence. This prompted a surge of intensity and passion among the angry crowd, who pushed through into the Capitol building chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” After the crowds had been cleared, as members of Congress filed back into the ransacked Capitol to complete their work, Eastman sent another email: would Pence consider overturning the election now?A person of conscience and integrity would never have found himself in the position that Mike Pence was in on January 6. A man with courage would have stood up to Trump sooner; a man of moral commitment would never have worked for him in the first place. Still, the committee’s argument that Pence did something honorable when he refused to carry through the illegal plan put forth by Eastman might carry some weight, in the sense that Pence was under enormous, life-threatening pressure to do the wrong thing, and he did not. But perhaps this is the real indictment of the American system of government: if we were a functioning democracy, the rule of law wouldn’t be dependent on something so flimsy as Mike Pence’s honor.But as a symbol for a good Republican, Pence hardly seems to fit the image of uprightness and dignity that the committee is trying to assign him. The members of the January 6 committee clearly want to address these “good” Republicans, to show them that their party need not be defined by Trump, to bring them back to the light. But the people they are talking to don’t exist anymore.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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      Capitol attack prosecutors press January 6 committee for transcripts

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      Capitol attack prosecutors press January 6 committee for transcripts Attorneys general say material is needed for criminal cases but congressional inquiry says it must be left to do its work Tensions between the US justice department and the House of Representatives January 6 select committee have escalated after federal prosecutors complained that their inability to access witness transcripts was hampering criminal investigations into rioters who stormed the Capitol.The complaint that came from the heads of the justice department’s national security and criminal divisions and the US attorney for Washington Matthew Graves showed a likely collision course for the parallel congressional and criminal probes into the Capitol attack.“The interviews the select committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions,” Graves wrote, alongside assistant attorneys general Kenneth Polite and Matthew Olsen.“The select committee’s failure to grant the department access to these transcripts complicates the department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol.”01:56Federal prosecutors are seeking all of the select committee’s transcripts as they quietly expand their criminal inquiry into January 6 rally organizers and people in Donald Trump’s orbit, according to a source familiar with the matter and grand jury subpoenas reviewed by the Guardian.The justice department has empaneled one grand jury in Washington to investigate the rally organizers, examining whether any executive or legislative branch officials were involved in trying to criminally obstruct Joe Biden’s congressional certification.Another grand jury also appears to be investigating political operatives and lawyers close to Trump, including the ex-president’s former attorney Rudy Giuliani, over their involvement in a scheme to send fake Trump electors to Congress on January 6.The justice department has also signaled a potential interest in moving more aggressively with Capitol attack related prosecutions. The US attorney general, Merrick Garland, said this week that he and federal prosecutors were closely watching the select committee’s hearings on Capitol Hill.Trump a ‘clear and present danger to US democracy’, conservative judge warnsRead moreBut the panel has been reluctant to work with the justice department, in part because of fears that they lose control over their work product once they release the transcripts or that prosecutors might misinterpret their evidence, according to a source close to the inquiry.The chairman of the select committee, Bennie Thompson, said on Thursday that the panel would eventually cooperate with the justice department but the panel was “not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we’ve gotten … We have to do our work.”The public repudiation by top justice department officials – the letter came during the panel’s third hearing into the Capitol attack – marks the latest point in steadily worsening relations ahead of looming trial dates for members of the far-right Proud Boys group on seditious conspiracy charges.Federal prosecutors said they were seeking witness transcripts as part of their preparations for an expected trial in September of five top Proud Boys members charged with seditious conspiracy and obstructing an official proceeding on January 6.The justice department’s complaint was included in a court filing as part of prosecutors’ notice to the judge that they agreed with defendants’ request to delay trial because of a lack of access to the panel’s witness transcripts.US district judge Timothy Kelly set a hearing on the matter for next Wednesday after a lawyer for one of the Proud Boys, Ethan Nordean, objected to the trial delay. Kelly gave former Proud Boys leader Henry Tarrio and another defendant until Monday to say whether they also objected to the request.TopicsUS Capitol attackUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      ‘System nearly failed’: US democracy was left hanging by the thread of Pence’s defiance

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      ‘System nearly failed’: US democracy was left hanging by the thread of Pence’s defianceIf the vice-president had acquiesced to Trump’s demand, the country could have plunged into an unprecedented crisis The January 6 select committee showed on Thursday that Mike Pence withstood an intense pressure campaign from Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.Trump’s advisers repeatedly tried to convince Pence to disrupt the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, even after they themselves acknowledged that there was no constitutional basis for the vice-president to do so.Pence was 40ft from mob on January 6: ‘Vice-president’s life was in danger’Read morePence ultimately refused to interfere with the certification process, despite facing threats to his personal safety from Trump’s supporters who stormed the Capitol. But if Pence had acquiesced to Trump’s demands, the US could have faced an unprecedented constitutional crisis, the committee warned on Thursday.“We’re fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage on January 6,” said Bennie Thompson, the Democratic chair of the committee. “Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe.”Thompson’s warning was echoed by Michael Luttig, a retired federal judge who served as an advisor to Pence in the weeks after the 2020 election. Luttig argued that, if Pence had tried to overturn the results of the election, that effort would have threatened the very foundation of American democracy.“That declaration of Donald Trump as the next president would have plunged America into what I believe would have been tantamount to a revolution within a constitutional crisis,” Luttig said.The Trump team’s legal efforts to overturn the election results were spearheaded by conservative lawyer John Eastman, the committee heard Thursday. Eastman tried to convince Pence and his advisors that the vice-president had the authority, under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, to reject the results. Luttig summarily rejected that theory on Thursday, joining a loud chorus of constitutional experts who had already dismissed Eastman’s idea.“There was no basis in the Constitution or laws of the United States, at all, for the theory espoused by Mr Eastman. At all. None,” Luttig said. He added, “I would have laid my body across the road before I would have let the vice-president overturn the 2020 presidential election on the basis of that historical precedent.”According to Pence’s former counsel, Greg Jacob, even Eastman himself acknowledged that such a strategy would not withstand legal scrutiny. Eastman told Jacob that he believed the supreme court would reject the theory in a unanimous vote of 9 to 0.And yet, Trump and his allies continued to pursue their unconstitutional strategy. The committee shared new footage Thursday showing January 6 insurrectionists threatening the vice-president for refusing to block the certification, as rioters chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”Instead of offering support to his endangered vice-president, Trump escalated his pressure on Pence. At 2.24pm, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution, giving states a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”Committee member Pete Aguilar, who took a lead role in questioning Jacob and Luttig at the Thursday hearing, said that immediately after Trump sent his tweet, the crowds in and around the Capitol surged, and Pence was evacuated.“Make no mistake about the fact that the vice-president’s life was in danger,” Aguilar said.In light of the serious threats Pence faced on January 6, many viewers of the hearing marveled at the fact that he ultimately followed through with certifying the election, ensuring the transfer of presidential power.“Had Pence not certified the election, there’d likely be violent protests in the streets,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, Trump’s former communications director, said on Twitter. “Lame duck Trump would undoubtedly try to use the military to quell unrest. You’d have general officers refusing orders. The republic would be in crisis.”Instead, Congress stayed in session until the early hours of 7 January to oversee the counting of electoral college votes and make Biden’s victory official.In the year and a half since the insurrection, lawmakers have taken steps to guarantee that a future vice-president cannot ignore the will of the people. A bipartisan group of senators is working to reform the Electoral Count Act, and they announced last week that they had reached a general agreement on language clarifying the vice-president’s role to be entirely ministerial during the counting of electoral college votes.The alarming testimony from members of Pence’s inner circle underscored the immense importance of those senators’ work, while revealing just how close the US came to an even larger disaster on January 6.Thompson chose to close out the Thursday hearing with a stark warning to the entire country: although the system of American democracy held this time, that does not guarantee it will survive the next threat.“There are some who think the danger has passed, that even though there was violence and a corrupt attempt to overturn the presidential election, the system worked,” Thompson said.“I look at it another way. Our system nearly failed and our democratic foundation destroyed but for people like you.”TopicsJanuary 6 hearingsUS Capitol attackMike PenceDonald TrumpUS politicsanalysisReuse this content More

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      Pence the ‘hero’ who foiled Trump’s plot – could it lead to a 2024 run?

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      Pence the ‘hero’ who foiled Trump’s plot – could it lead to a 2024 run? The former VP rejected the plot to overturn the election – the death knell for Trump and Pence’s marriage of convenienceMike Pence was described as the hero of the hour, the man who stood his ground to Donald Trump’s coup plot and saved America from a violent “revolution”.Pence was 40ft from mob on January 6: ‘vice-president’s life was in danger’Read moreYet among the rows of committee members, witnesses, reporters, congressmen and women and young citizens at Thursday’s January 6 hearing into the attack on the Capitol, the former vice-president was nowhere to be seen. Pence was 500 miles away in Ohio to promote “American energy dominance”.Both events could ultimately lead in the same direction: Pence 2024, a once unlikely presidential campaign illuminating the complexity of his relationship with his former boss, Trump.Pence has dropped numerous clues already, from founding an organisation, Advancing American Freedom, to touring Republican primary battlegrounds. Nothing that the 63-year-old says on the early campaign trail, however, might be as crucial as the near three hours that played out in his absence on Thursday before a TV audience of millions.But the panel came to praise Pence, not to bury him, or to hang him, for that matter – like some of Trump’s insurrectionists wanted. Even while he was taking part in a roundtable discussion in Cincinnati, the ex-vice-president’s ears might have been burning as the congressional committee investigating last year’s deadly assault on the US Capitol cast him as the savior of the republic.They spoke of a man who put his loyalty to country ahead of his loyalty to Trump, a potential selling point to Republican voters who may want to move on from the former president. But the session could also prove a serious liability for Pence with the Trump base, hardening its view of him as a traitor.The third public hearing was about Trump’s attempts to pressure Pence to overturn his 2020 election defeat. It heard how the president was told repeatedly that Pence lacked the constitutional and legal authority to meet his demands.Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, began the hearing by observing: “Mike Pence said no. He resisted the pressure. He knew it was illegal. He knew it was wrong. We are fortunate for Mr Pence’s courage on January 6. Our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe. That courage put him very close to tremendous danger.”The vice-chairwoman, Liz Cheney, a Republican who in theory could run against Pence in 2024, added: “Pence understood that his oath of office was more important than his loyalty to Donald Trump. He did his duty. President Trump unequivocally did not.”The committee heard how Trump latched on to a “nonsensical” plan from a conservative law professor, John Eastman, and launched a public and private pressure campaign on Pence days before he was to preside over the January 6 joint session of Congress to certify Joe Biden’s election victory.Witness Greg Jacob, who was the vice-president’s counsel, testified that Pence refused to yield to it. The former Indiana governor understood the founding fathers did not intend to empower any one person to affect an election result and never wavered from that view.It was the death knell for the Trump and Pence’s marriage of political convenience. The president whined: “I don’t want to be your friend any more if you don’t do this.”And as a giant screen in the cavernous caucus room showed, it lit the fuse for a mob on January 6 to make bellicose declarations such as “Mike Pence has betrayed the United States of America!” The sound of chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” was juxtaposed with the image of a mock gallows against the backdrop of the US Capitol dome.Computer graphics demonstrated how Pence was evacuated from the Senate chamber but was just 40 feet from the mob and in great peril. Jacob recalled: “I can hear the din of the rioters in the building while we moved. I don’t think I was aware they were as close as that.”The committee noted that a confidential informant told the FBI that the far-right group the Proud Boys would have killed Pence if they got the chance. Jacob recalled how Pence declined to leave, insisting that the world must not see the vice-president “fleeing the United States Capitol”.Yet Trump never called to check on his safety. Asked how Pence and his wife Karen reacted to that, Jacob replied simply: “With frustration.”The implication was that Pence bravely alone stood between America and catastrophe. But the praise singing was jarring to critics who wondered why he was far away in Ohio and not here to speak for himself.Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian, tweeted: “Why won’t Pence testify before the January 6 House Committee and tell all of us what really happened?”Pence did, after all, act as Trump’s enabler for the previous four years. As vice-president he gave speech after speech lauding his boss and his policies, betraying no hint of dissent. In one strange example of sycophancy, he even seemed to imitate Trump’s actions in placing a water bottle on the floor.Asha Rangappa, a lawyer, CNN analyst and former FBI special agent, wrote on Twitter: “Pence is not a hero. Pence is a coward. It just so happens that on Jan 6, his fear of displeasing Trump was (fortunately) outweighed by a fear of something else – either being implicated in a failed coup and/or aiding and abetting criminal activity – but he’s still a coward.”Even now, while stating that Trump was “wrong” to seek to overturn the election, Pence also regularly trumpets the achievements of the Trump-Pence administration, pushes rightwing talking points and savages Biden and the “woke” left.A presidential run would presumably try to square the circle by offering a resumption of the “America first” agenda but within recognised constitutional and democratic boundaries. “Look, I’m Donald Trump but without the violence,” as Michael D’Antonio, a Pence biographer, has put it.But Thursday’s hearing might just as easily be the breaking, not the making, of a Pence bid for the White House. His defiance of Trump has now been luminously displayed for a national audience and recorded for posterity. He will not be speaking at this week’s Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Nashville after being booed last year; Trump is the star turn on Friday.If the Republican party was still “team normal”, Pence would now be strongly placed to make the case that he was a loyal vice-president who showed his independence when it mattered. This week’s primary election results, however, suggest that the party remains “team Maga” and some still believe that Pence should hang.TopicsMike PenceJanuary 6 hearingsUS politicsRepublicansDonald TrumpUS Capitol attacknewsReuse this content More

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      January 6 panel says Trump brought US ‘dangerously close to catastrophe’ – video

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      The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol presented evidence on Thursday that Donald Trump was told his last-gasp attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election was unlawful but forged ahead anyway. ‘Donald Trump wanted Mike Pence to do something no other vice president has ever done. The former president wanted Pence to reject the votes and either declare Trump the winner or send the votes back to the states to be counted again,’ congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee said. ‘We were fortunate for Mr. Pence’s courage. On January 6, our democracy came dangerously close to catastrophe’

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      Trumpists stitched a legal theory from whole cloth. The hearings tore it apart | Lloyd Green

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      Trumpists stitched a legal theory from whole cloth. The hearings tore it apartLloyd GreenOver the course of nearly three hours, the public repeatedly heard that Mike Pence lacked the authority to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election On Thursday, the House special committee again met. An hour earlier, Representative Bennie Thompson announced that the committee would invite Ginni Thomas, wife of US supreme court justice Clarence Thomas, to testify. A day before, a federal court rejected Steve Bannon’s attempt to dismiss contempt of Congress charges.“The court cannot conclude that the committee was invalidly constituted such that the indictment should be dismissed,” Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, announced. If convicted at an upcoming trial, Bannon, a former Trump senior adviser, faces up to two years in prison.Trump lawyer John Eastman sought presidential pardon after January 6Read moreThe third committee session offered no fireworks. Rather, over the course of nearly three hours, the public repeatedly heard in the driest terms that Mike Pence lacked the authority to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.J Michael Luttig, a retired appellate judge appointed to the federal bench by George HW Bush, Greg Jacob, the vice president’s counsel, and Eric Herschmann, a Trump White House lawyer, all made that reality abundantly clear.The theory advanced by Donald Trump and concocted by John Eastman – a former clerk to Justice Thomas and Judge Luttig and a pen pal of Ginni Thomas – was a lie. It was stitched from whole cloth to sate the ambitions of the Oval Office’s desperate occupant and his minions.To quote Pence’s counsel, “there was no way” that a sitting vice president could unilaterally decide or alter the election’s outcome at a joint session of Congress. The witnesses stressed that to say otherwise would license Kamala Harris to do just that in early 2025 or have conferred upon Al Gore the power to commit constitutional “mischief” back in January 2001.Eastman’s name and theories received repeated mention throughout the hearing. In August 2020, Eastman penned an op-ed challenging Kamala Harris’s US citizenship and her eligibility to run for vice president. For the record, Harris was born in Oakland, which is very much part of America.The Eastman-Ginni Thomas alliance hovered over the hearing but received no mention before the cameras. Starting Monday night, a stream of stories emerged of communications between Ms Thomas and Eastman. Further, the New York Times reported that Eastman conveyed to Kenneth Chesebro, a pro-Trump lawyer, the state of play within the high court.“So the odds are not based on the legal merits but an assessment of the justices’ spines, and I understand that there is a heated fight underway,” Eastman wrote.From the sound of things, Eastman became privy to pillow-talk between the justice and his wife.It was only a few short weeks ago that the right exploded over the leak of a draft of a supreme court decision that stands to overturn Roe v Wade and undo constitutional protections for reproductive freedom. Now, only crickets.“We think it’s time that we, at some point, invite [Ginni Thomas] to come talk to the committee,” Bennie Thompson, the committee chair, told Axios on Thursday. “It’s time for us to invite her to come talk,” he relayed to CNN.Like Bannon, Eastman failed in his efforts to undercut the committee. In March, a federal court ruled that Eastman could not block the production of certain documents despite their possibly constituting “attorney-work product”. Instead, the crime-fraud exception attached, and the privilege did not apply.“Based on the evidence, the court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6 2021,” the court opined.During the Trump administration’s waning days, Eastman sought but failed to obtain a presidential pardon. Herschmann told Eastman to lawyer up. Fittingly, Eastman has invoked his right against self-incrimination before the committee 100 times.Despite all this, the hearings have not swayed broad swaths of the public. In Nevada, election-deniers ran the table in Tuesday’s Republican primaries. Further east, in Michigan, indicted Ryan Kelley is in the hunt for the party’s gubernatorial nomination.Instead, a recent poll shows half the country predicting that someday the US will “cease” to be a democracy. Beyond that, 49% of respondents answered that they were not following the hearings.Judge Luttig repeated that the 45th president and some of his followers were a “threat” to democracy – not simply for what happened on 6 January 2021, but on account on the 2024 presidential race and what may follow.At the moment, Trump is considering whether to announce his candidacy before November’s midterms. Beyond that, plans for a Trump-driven steal reportedly appear to be in the works. If Mike Pence prayed the morning of 6 January, he was right to.
      An attorney in New York, Lloyd Green is a regular contributor and served in the Department of Justice from 1990 to 1992
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      'Are you out of your mind?': White House lawyer testifies on exchange with Trump's attorney – video

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      During a hearing on last year’s assault on the US Capitol, former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann testified that he told attorney John Eastman, who represented former president Donald Trump in a long-shot bid to overturn the voting results, that challenging the certification of the 2020 presidential election was extremely problematic, telling him: ‘Are you out of your effing mind?’

      Jan 6 hearings live: Trump is ‘clear and present danger to American democracy’, conservative judge warns More