Holding the Guilty One Accountable

Likely their last hearing, the Jan. 6 Committee tightens the screws on Trump and showcases who was exacerbating the dangers and who was taking charge to help set things right

“Do you believe this?” asks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? The video was screened yesterday at the House Select Committee hearing. (Photo by Jonathan Ernst-Pool/Getty Images)

It was the usual self-serving attitude. "The Supreme Court really let us down," Donald Trump tweeted on the night of Friday December 11, 2020. “No Wisdom, No Courage!"

Earlier that day, the Supreme Court had denied his and 126 House Republicans’ efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. As Roll Call reported that day, “The decision all but ends Trump’s ineffectual legal push over the past few weeks to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election—one that included allegations of voter fraud in mail-in ballots or tabulating shenanigans in key states that went unproven, and loss after loss in state and federal courts.”

But, as we all know so painfully well, Trump was not about to stop once his legal avenues reached a dead end. A week later, on Dec. 19, he made his public plea to the people whose outrage he’d been fomenting: “Big protest on January 6. Be there, will be wild.”

Among the revelatory snapshots at yesterday’s likely last hearing of the House Select Committee, we learned that the week before “will be wild” and following the Supreme Court that “let us down,” Trump was looking for a way out, a way to hold onto power.

According to White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who witnessed Trump’s conversation with her boss, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Trump said something to the effect of: “I don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing. Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

This was one of a series of comments from White House staff making it clear that Trump knew that he had lost, undermining his ability to claim that he lacked criminal intent on Jan. 6 because he really thought that he won. “He knows that it’s over. He knows that he lost,” Hutchinson said Meadows told her.

The week after the plea by Trump to come to the Capitol for the “big protest,” the Secret Service was informed of the impending danger—that’s the protective service that subsequently deleted its texts leading up to and during Jan. 6. As Rep. Adam Schiff noted yesterday, the Secret Service received an alert on Dec. 24 headed “Armed and Ready, Mr. President,” with online talk targeting members of Congress and pledging to “start marching into the chambers” and “make sure they know who to fear.”

Two days later, on Dec. 26, the Secret Service received a tip from an FBI field office that the Proud Boys planned to march into DC armed and outnumber the police. “Their plan is to literally kill people,” the informant asserted. “Please please take this tip seriously and investigate further.”

We know now that advanced insights like this were ignored. But it wasn’t just the Secret Service at fault. NBC’s Ken Dilanian not only reminded “that the FBI repeatedly said the bureau had no intelligence that anyone was planning to attack the Capitol,” he also reported on a memo sent to a top FBI bureau manager a week after Jan. 6 saying “there is…a sizeable percentage of the employee population that felt sympathetic to the group that stormed the Capitol.”

While the Jan. 6 committee concluded its hearing with a dramatic unanimous vote subpoenaing Donald Trump to testify, an act that offered at least a momentary thrill, I wouldn’t count on that guest appearance. As much as a malignant narcissist hungers for attention on centerstage, he’s already made clear that he views the committee as fraudulent—not to mention the probability that testifying (and testifying falsely) would only deepen his criminal liability.

Speaking of criminal liability, the former White House occupant got more bad news yesterday when the Supreme Court denied 9-0 his effort to overrule the appeals court and return the 100 classified documents to special master Judge Raymond Dearie—an act which would have slowed the Justice Department’s criminal investigation.

But I leave you with this snapshot from yesterday’s hearing, a previously unseen and revelatory video that gives a clear picture of what a cool, calm political leader looks like when she takes charge amid extreme crisis conditions. That person is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—along with other Congressional leaders—who the Republicans have aggressively attempted to make the target of blame for what happened on Jan. 6.

After Trump had incited the crowd to breach the Capitol and then retreated to the White House for some delightful TV viewing of the hoped-for carnage, Pelosi was in a secure location and taking charge. As she watches an image of a protestor shattering glass with a police shield, we see her talking to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and asking him to deploy the state’s National Guard to Washington. We see her imploring a dissembling Pentagon official to act.

“Well, just pretend for a moment that it was the Pentagon or the White House or some other entity that was under siege,” Pelosi tells the unnamed official trying to avoid responsibility. “And let me say, you can logistically get people there as you make the plan.”

We also see her, along with a more agitated Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, talking to acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen. “They’re obviously ransacking our offices and all the rest of that; that’s nothing,” she tells him. “The concern we have is about personal safety—it just transcends everything.”

We also watch her on the phone telling VP Mike Pence that Congressional leaders from both parties believe strongly that that it’s necessary “to get this job done today”—that is, to certify the election for President-elect Joe Biden. And we hear her more than once state clearly where the source of this dark day’s problem resides: “It’s just horrendous,” she says. “And all at the instigation of the president of the United States.”

Soon we’ll learn if the committee will make a criminal referral to DOJ. But their mounting body of evidence may make such a referral beside the point. Merrick Garland and company should have what they need to indict—for the Jan. 6 attack and the theft of government documents to Mar-a-Lago. The question is when they’ll pull the trigger and begin the necessary next phase in this ongoing crime story.

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