Perfidy Personified: Donald Trump Revelations Analyzed By Dan Rather

Editor’s Note: The following guest column was written by Dan Rather, right, following revelations on Tuesday, July 12, 2022 about former President Donald Trump during the seventh of the House Jan. 6 Committee hearings.

This was first published in Rather’s near-daily column “Steady,” which he named to urge readers to stay balanced during our troubled times. This editor is a subscriber to the columns, published on a near-basis with Rather’s coauthor Elliot Kirschner and benefiting from Rather’s experience and blunt, colorful style. Rather, age 90 and currently based in his native Texas, is the iconic author and journalist whose posts included working for many years as the CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor.

– Andrew Kreig

President Donald Trump speaks to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on January 6, 2021 (Photo by Brendan Smialowski for Agence France-Presse via Getty Images)

Perfidy Personified: The more we learn, the worse it gets.

By Dan Rather and Elliot Kirschner

Anger and concern well up. Anger and concern that are fueled by love for a country that has been violently transgressed. By a president of the United States no less. And with stunning complicity from those who actively participated in an attempted coup, and those who stood by and did nothing while their country teetered on the edge of chaos. Unbelievable. But believe it we must. Because true it is.

We struggle to keep the mantra: steady, steady, steady. But in doing so may we follow the lead of the January 6 committee whose methodical, steady — admirably steady — pursuit of the facts has brought into the light a perfidy perhaps unmatched in the modern history of this nation.

When one must reach for comparisons to the Civil War to bring context to our current moment, it is to acknowledge the gravity of what we are learning.

Another day of hearings, and yet more details in a tableau of rampant law breaking. It is at a scale that is beyond what anyone could have imagined. Those who screamed into the void about what this man did and what he was capable of were often dismissed as histrionic. But even the most outrageous of suppositions have turned out to have been too restrained. The truth now has far outpaced the speculation. And the probability is that we have more to learn.

Take the news that ended today’s hearing, that there is new evidence raising questions about witnesses and a Trump telephone call. Did the president of the United States directly engage in witness tampering? It is impossible to be shocked anymore, yet it remains shocking to even have to ask the question. I’ve said something of this nature many times before; it only becomes more accurate with each new revelation.

And let us note with emphasis the new revelation that the president indicated that he wanted the U.S. military to seize voting machines as a means of keeping him in power past an election which he had clearly lost.

Perhaps if the reality of what took place was less abhorrent we might be able to process it more easily, and thus be less stunned.

Can this really be happening? Did all of this really occur?

Above all, one question looms for which we must demand answers:

Twitter avatar for @DanRather

“How is all of this only coming out now?” It’s THE question for all who could have made a difference. At any step along the way.

July 12th 2022

There must be soul searching at all levels.

The cowardice of those who saw this unfold in real time and said nothing is a permanent stain on their characters. Those who would explain it away, or who sought to sabotage this investigation — and that includes almost every elected Republican in Congress — have put their narrow party’s unquenched thirst for power ahead of the country.

We must ask: What was happening at the Department of Justice? And what is happening there now?

It brings me no joy to include the press as an institution in this tally of systemic breakdown. How could this story have been so widely missed? And is the full scale of it being given enough prominence? A story of this scale and far-ranging nature is bigger than just the White House press corps. Everyone should have been asking questions. It is not too late to dig into it with more investigative journalism. And while doing so, false equivalence should be banished from every newsroom.

Let us not forget that President Trump was impeached for what happened on January 6, and in the Senate trial that followed, we didn’t come close to learning the full truth of his actions. The moment passed without sufficient scrutiny. No longer.

When this House committee was formed, there was a belief among many that the investigation would shed little that was new for those who had been paying attention. Sort of like crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Yet these patriotic members of Congress, and patriots they all are, have greatly exceeded expectations with professionalism and steely resolve. How stark their example stands in contrast to so many others who were perfectly happy to stay in the shadows in a moment when their country needed them to shed light.

Finally, thought turns tonight to the justices on the Supreme Court who claim to be “originalists.” Three of them were appointed by perhaps the most dangerous man to ever have held the office of president. In their decisions blowing up established rights, these justices like to claim to base their rulings on what the Founding Fathers thought.

I wonder what those founders would have made of a would-be dictator who sought to use force to overthrow the will of the people in order to set up dynastic rule. Actually, I don’t have to wonder. You can read about it in the Declaration of Independence, and it infuses the U.S. Constitution. It is the words that all of these people swore to uphold and then defiled in a craven play for power over justice and democracy.

Contact the author Andrew Kreig

  Related News Coverage

Proof, Investigative Commentary: Did Donald Trump Commit Treason on December 18, 2020? The Arguments on Both Sides of a Suddenly Pressing Question, Seth Abramson, left, July 13-14, 2022. The July 12 House January 6 Committee hearing was filled with shocking testimony. Perhaps the most shocking testimony has thus far gone overlooked by major media analyses—but it may point to Treason.

The position of Proof since its founding on January 14, 2021, has been that Donald Trump did not commit treason on January 6, 2021, or at any time before then—not because he’s a loyal American citizen, because he is not, but because Treason (the federal criminal statute) comprises a set of evidentiary elements a prosecutor must prove at trial.

It has been the view of this former criminal defense attorney that the facts of the January 6 insurrection, as heinous as they are, simply do not match the language of the Treason statute. Maybe the statute has blind-spots and should be rewritten; certainly Trump should be indicted for any crimes he committed (and is still trying to commit, apparently) related to January 6; but criminal statutes cannot and should not be retroactive. Therefore, the thinking here has been, Trump is not eligible to be federally prosecuted for Treason.

Or so Proof thought, until yesterday’s televised House January 6 Committee hearing.

Yesterday the strictly legal question of whether Trump is a traitor to the United States—that is, whether he committed statutory treason—became a viable one for the first time. And though I searched cable news and other news sources last night in the hope of finding some analysis of this question, I couldn’t find any, so I’m providing it here.

Proof will here offer the case both “for” and “against” former President Trump having committed the crime of Treason on December 18, 2020. I’ll be citing the new evidence from yesterday’s highly disturbing Congressional hearing as well as evidence formerly disclosed by Congress and/or Proof.

Seth Abramson, shown above and at right, is founder of Proof and is a former criminal defense attorney and criminal investigator who teaches digital journalism, legal advocacy, and cultural theory at the University of New Hampshire. A regular political and legal analyst on CNN and the BBC during the Trump presidency, he is a best-selling author who has published eight books and edited five anthologies.

Wayne Madsen Report, Investigative Commentary: Trump’s “Red Wedding” was to have been a “Night of the Long Knives,” Wayne Madsen, left, author of 22 books and former Navy intelligence officer and NSA analyst, July 14, 2022. January 6, 2021 could have rivaled June 30-July 2, 1934 when it came to bloody revenge against political opponents.

It is quite clear that Donald Trump and his supporters who took part in planning and executing the January 6th insurrection in Washington, DC aimed to kill as many members of Congress, government employees, and journalists as possible.

Thanks to the January 6 Select Committee’s investigation to date, we know that the insurrection was planned weeks in advance by Trump and his inside and outside advisers. The J6 Committee played a video of one such Trump supporter, a YouTube blogger who goes by the handle “Salty Cracker,” exhorting his 750,000 subscribers to join in what was planned to be a bloody uprising in Washington on January 6.

He said, “You better understand something, son. Red wave, bitch! There’s gonna be a Red Wedding going down Jan. 6 . . . Motherfucker, you better look outside. You better look out Jan. 6, kick that fucking door open and look down the street. There’s going to be a million-plus geeked-up, armed Americans.”

“Red Wedding” is a scene in the television series “Game of Thrones” that depicts unsuspecting attendees of a wedding feast becoming victims of a planned massacre.

Trump knew that many of the insurrectionists were armed and that they had a list of who they planned to murder. That list included Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the second and third in the presidential line of succession.

House Jan. 6 Select Investigating Committee Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS.) ((Photo via NBC News).

New York Times, Jan. 6 Panel Will Turn Over Evidence on Fake Electors to the Justice Dept., Luke Broadwater, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). The department has asked the House committee to share transcripts regarding the false electors scheme, the only topic it has broached with the panel.

The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for evidence it has accumulated about the scheme by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, disclosed the request to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Justice Department about the false elector scheme were ongoing. Those talks suggest that the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, one with a direct line to the former president.

Mr. Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to allow them to review the transcripts of interviews the panel has done with people who served as so-called alternate electors for Mr. Trump. Mr. Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation into “fraudulent electors” was the only specific topic the agency had broached with the committee.

New York Times, ‘It’s Just Been Hell:’ Life as the Victim of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory, Alan Feuer, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.

Up a winding country road, in a trailer park a half-mile from a cattle ranch, lives a man whose life has been ruined by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.

Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year.

Strangers have assailed him as a coward and a traitor and have menacingly cautioned him to sleep with one eye open. He was forced to sell his business and his home in Arizona. Fearing for his safety and uncertain of his future, he and his wife moved into a mobile home in the foothills of the Rockies, with all of their belongings crammed into shipping containers in a high-desert meadow, a mile or two away.

July 13

Trump-supporting former law school dean John Eastman, left, helps Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani inflame pro-Trump protesters in front the White House before the insurrection riot at the U.S. Capitol to prevent the presidential election certification of Joe Biden’s presidency on Jan. 6, 2021 (Los Angeles Times photo). 

Salon, Commentary: MAGA is complicit — not conned: Trump supporters were the most pivotal part of his coup, Amanda Marcotte, July 13, 2022. Americans love a redemption story, especially one that reassures liberal America that right-wing jackasses just need a little education to see the light and renounce their bigoted pasts. Inevitably, then, there was widespread swooning in the denouement of Tuesday’s hearing when Stephen Ayres, an insurrectionist who testified about his January 6 regrets, approached four police officers injured in the riot to apologize.

An “extraordinary moment,” is how Jacqueline Alemany of the Washington Post described it. “Somewhere in here is our way out of this,” comedian Chip Franklin tweeted. Former Democratic Senator from Missouri Claire McCaskill gushed that Ayres “had the class to apologize” and “the courage to come forward and admit he was duped.”

“Impressive,” she concluded.

The officers themselves, however, were much less impressed.

Former Metropolitan Police officer Michael Fanone, shown above at a hearing and at left under attack by the mob that gave him severe injuries, bluntly told reporters the apology “doesn’t really do shit for me.” Capitol Police officer Aquilino Gonell, who was forced to retire due to disabilities caused by the riot, accepted the apology reluctantly, saying, “He still has to answer for what he did legally.” In response to a saccharine tweet about “apology given and accepted,” Capitol Police officer Harry Dunn clarified, “*Apology given….”

“I got nothing,” Dunn later told ABC News, noting that he does still “believe in forgiveness” over time.

As the discomfort with Ayres’ testimony and apology demonstrates, the simplistic redemption narrative is a tough sell.

Metropolitan Police office Daniel Hodges did tell CNN’s Jake Tapper that he accepted the apology, but with noticeable reluctance and only, he argued, for pragmatic reasons, “You have to be willing to forgive those people” when they apologize, he argued, “because if you de-incentivize the return to rationality, this culture war will never end.”

As I noted in my analysis of Tuesday’s hearing, there are good reasons the January 6 committee wishes to portray people like Ayres as victims who, to quote Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., “put their faith, their trust, in Donald Trump” only to be “deceived” by him. It’s easier, both politically and legally, to hold Trump responsible if the people who did his bidding are cast as dupes in the thrall of a deceptive cult leader. Plus, as Hodges notes, there’s less incentive for Trumpers to renounce their leader if they get shunned no matter what.

This is not the tragic story of the cult followers of Jim Jones or Keith Raniere, whose sympathetic desires for empowerment and community were used against them. People go MAGA because of their ugliest impulses. They follow Trump because he’s a violent racist and a sexual predator, not despite those facts. Trump gives his followers permission to be their worst selves, and that’s why they love him.

Much of Tuesday’s hearing was focused on how Trump deliberately rejected factual information and surrounded himself with people like Rudy Giuliani, Mike Lindell, and Sidney Powell, all of whom would tell him whatever idiotic lies he wanted to hear. What was elided, however, was that Trump’s followers like Ayres do exactly the same thing. No one is forcing them to turn away from fact-driven media so that they can wallow in disinformation on Fox News and Facebook. That is a choice they are making — for exactly the same reason Trump makes it: They prefer their toxic fantasies over the truth.

Reading the FBI arrest documents for Ayres strongly challenges the notion that he was an innocent dupe who was just working on bad information. Literally, within hours of the Capitol insurrection, Ayres was on Facebook generating disinformation of his own. In the video, Ayres and his friend try to pin the whole thing on “antifa,” even though, as participants in the insurrection, they knew full well who was actually motivating the crowd.

This video points to a hard but necessary truth to absorb about Trump supporters: They believe themselves to be in on the con. Trump does bamboozle them with lies, but not the ones that January 6 committee and the media focus on, such as the election lies. His real trick is convincing his supporters that they can get away with lying and cheating, just the way their beloved leader gets away with it.

Of course, as Ayre’s arrest record shows, they can’t.

But that doesn’t mean the situation is hopeless. The real story from Ayres’s testimony yesterday is not one of remorse, but of the power of consequences. There may not be much that can be done about people clinging to bigoted ideologies because it suits their egos to believe them.

But they can be convinced not to break the law in order to achieve bigoted ends if there are legal consequences in doing so. This is why it’s so crucial not to let Trump skate away from legal consequences for attempting a coup. The reason the insurrectionists rioted that day is because Trump led them to believe that they, like him, they could get away with committing crimes. He continues to dangle the promise of pardons to keep them on the hook. If he finally stopped getting away with crime, it might chill the faith his followers have that they, too, are immune from facing consequences.

New York Times, Jan. 6 Panel Will Turn Over Evidence on Fake Electors to the Justice Dept., Luke Broadwater, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). The department has asked the House committee to share transcripts regarding the false electors scheme, the only topic it has broached with the panel.

The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol for evidence it has accumulated about the scheme by former President Donald J. Trump and his allies to put forward false slates of pro-Trump electors in battleground states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020.

Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee, disclosed the request to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, and a person familiar with the panel’s work said discussions with the Justice Department about the false elector scheme were ongoing. Those talks suggest that the department is sharpening its focus on that aspect of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, one with a direct line to the former president.

Mr. Thompson said the committee was working with federal prosecutors to allow them to review the transcripts of interviews the panel has done with people who served as so-called alternate electors for Mr. Trump. Mr. Thompson said the Justice Department’s investigation into “fraudulent electors” was the only specific topic the agency had broached with the committee.

New York Times, ‘It’s Just Been Hell:’ Life as the Victim of a Jan. 6 Conspiracy Theory, Alan Feuer, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). Ray Epps became the unwitting face of an attempt by pro-Trump forces to promote the baseless idea that the F.B.I. was behind the attack on the Capitol.

Up a winding country road, in a trailer park a half-mile from a cattle ranch, lives a man whose life has been ruined by a Jan. 6 conspiracy theory.

Ray Epps has suffered enormously in the past 10 months as right-wing media figures and Republican politicians have baselessly described him as a covert government agent who helped to instigate the attack on the Capitol last year.

Strangers have assailed him as a coward and a traitor and have menacingly cautioned him to sleep with one eye open. He was forced to sell his business and his home in Arizona. Fearing for his safety and uncertain of his future, he and his wife moved into a mobile home in the foothills of the Rockies, with all of their belongings crammed into shipping containers in a high-desert meadow, a mile or two away.

Washington Post, Opinion: Ex-cultists deliver the most effective message for Republicans, Jennifer Rubin, right, July 13, 2022. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), determined to rescue her party from the MAGA cult, has gone out of her way to offer her fellow Republicans models of exemplary behavior to follow.

Her argument: Don’t copy the example of defeated former president Donald Trump. Look instead to Republican officials who stood up to the defeated former president, such as former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers or even former vice president Mike Pence.

Two rather sad characters conveyed this “you don’t have to keep following Trump blindly” message at the House Jan. 6 select committee’s hearing on Tuesday. One was former Oath Keepers spokesperson Jason Van Tatenhove; the other was Stephen Ayres, who illegally entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. Both appeared deflated, diminished and embarrassed by their association with insurgents based on the “big lie” of a stolen election.

Still, they served two critical roles that those outside the MAGA world have not fully appreciated. First, they showed that a person can admit to being conned. Second, they warned that unless others break free from the violent cult, the United States will remain in deep trouble.

Washington Post, Analysis: Trump-appointed judges keep ruling against Trump and Co. on Jan. 6, Aaron Blake, July 13, 2022. Former Trump White House lawyer Eric Herschmann has quickly emerged as the most quotable man in the Jan. 6 committee hearings. And he delivered again in Tuesday’s edition, with the committee playing his characteristically exasperated comments about dealing with Sidney Powell and her bogus voter-fraud conspiracy theories, which were overwhelmingly shut down by judges.

“She says, ‘Well, the judges are corrupt,’ ” Herschmann recalled Powell saying. “And I was like, ‘Every one? Every single case that you’ve done in the country you guys lost? Every one of them was corrupt? Even the ones we appointed?’ I’m being nice. I was much more harsh to her.”

It’s not novel to point out that even Republican- and Trump-appointed judges have almost unanimously ruled against Donald Trump’s side on such things. But Herschmann’s comments crystallize something that should never be overlooked when it comes to evaluating the GOP’s Jan. 6 case. And they were played even as the legal setbacks in the fight against the Jan. 6 committee continued apace this week — courtesy of a Trump-appointed judge, no less.

Washington Post, Who is Patrick Byrne, former Overstock CEO and election denier? Eugene Scott, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). With a career-ending affair with a Russian agent, attacks on a professional nemesis he named “the Sith Lord” and constant references to a “deep state,” Patrick Byrne often pushed conspiracy theories and found himself ensnared in controversy — long before the former chief executive of online retailer Overstock promoted Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a rigged election.

Byrne, right, one of corporate America’s most vocal proponents of the former president’s falsehoods about the 2020 election, will be the latest figure from Trump’s orbit to meet with House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The longtime cryptocurrency advocate is scheduled to meet privately with the committee on Friday.

Byrne’s involvement in efforts to overturn the election were revealed Tuesday during the committee’s hearing. The former furniture industry executive joined lawyers Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, as well as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, in the Oval Office on Dec. 18, 2020, days after the electoral college certified that Joe Biden had won the presidential election. While many of Trump’s legal advisers had accepted that he had lost the election, Byrne and others were pushing an idea that the president could use the National Guard to seize voting machines.

Washington Post, Analysis: The significance of the new Steve Bannon tape, Aaron Blake, July 13, 2022. It’s not news that President Donald Trump aimed to prematurely declare victory on election night. But the tape fills out the picture of how Trumpworld might have viewed the utility of that — by causing a “firestorm.”

We don’t know whether Stephen K. Bannon will ultimately testify for the Jan. 6 committee. It seems pretty likely his offer to do so was a last-minute ploy to avoid criminal liability for flouting the committee’s subpoena. The committee reiterated Wednesday that Bannon must deliver the documents it has requested before it will enter into negotiations over testifying.

But there is little question that Bannon could be a significant witness. That was confirmed by a new piece of evidence that landed even as the Jan. 6 committee was holding a hearing Tuesday.

Mother Jones is out with a new Bannon tape from Oct. 31, 2020, in which Bannon talks in detail — presciently, it turns out — about how President Donald Trump would claim victory on election night regardless of where the vote count stood.

“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right?” Bannon told associates. “He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”

Bannon added: “As it sits here today, at 10 or 11 o’clock, Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that.’ ”

To be clear, this is hardly the first indication that Trump’s false victory declaration was preplanned, nor is it news that Bannon was predicting as much. A day after these taped comments, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Trump had told advisers that he would declare victory if it looked like he was ahead at the time — even if the outcome wasn’t final. And even as voters were voting on Election Day, Bannon on his podcast publicly echoed his private prediction that Trump would claim victory between 10 and 11 p.m.

But what the new comments add to the record is what Bannon might have viewed as the ends. And just as his prescience about Trump’s premature victory declaration and about “all hell” breaking loose on Jan. 6 invite all kinds of questions about just what he knew about Trump’s plans, so too does how he described the potential impact of Trump declaring victory.

On the tape, Bannon acknowledged something emphasized in the Axios story and elsewhere: that it was quite possible that Trump would be ahead on election night because his voters were more likely to vote in person, and more Democratic-heavy mail ballots are often counted later — something dubbed the “red mirage.” He came out and admitted that Trump would seek to exploit this misleading setup.

“More of our people vote early, that count; theirs vote in mail,” Bannon said. “And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage. And Trump’s going to take advantage of that. That’s our strategy. He’s going to declare himself a winner.”

Bannon then predicted with apparent glee that this would set off a “firestorm.”

“We’re going to have antifa crazy, the media crazy, the courts are crazy,” he said. “And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting s— out. ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the king.’ ”

Bannon added: “Also, if Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s gonna be even crazier.”

Bannon doesn’t come out and describe the utility of this “firestorm” in the comments reported by Mother Jones. What purpose could be served by inflaming antifa and the media, besides stoking grievances that have proven politically useful to Trump? Perhaps Bannon just reveled in the idea of owning the libs.

But there are other, earlier Bannon comments that suggest that perhaps he saw some real, electoral utility in manufacturing such a “firestorm” — and that he had an eye for January 2021 all along.

In an interview with Showtime’s “The Circus” released in early October — about a month before these other comments — Bannon predicted that there would be such uncertainty that Congress would be forced to decide the election. Bannon couched it in terms of Democrats supposedly seeking to overturn the election by counting mail ballots that he described as “uncertified,” but even that framing suggested that this supposed uncertainty could well be manufactured. And the practical effect was him predicting a situation much like the one Trump would ultimately gun for on Jan. 6.

Washington Post, Analysis: Jan. 6 panel spotlights Twitter’s role in insurrection, Cristiano Lima, July 14, 2022 (print ed.). For weeks, lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection have zeroed in on the multipronged campaign carried out by former president Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the 2020 election. But for the first time on Tuesday their public hearings detoured extensively to the role social media companies may have played in the attack on the Capitol.

Members of the House special committee cited tweets by Trump that spurred on supporters who stormed the Capitol and the testimony of a former Twitter employee who said their internal warnings about the potential for violence were largely ignored.

“The creation of the internet and social media has given today’s tyrants tools of propaganda and disinformation that yesterday’s despots could only have dreamed of,” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) said in his opening remarks at the panel’s seventh hearing.

The session offered the first public window into witness statements the panel has obtained from social media staffers and may provide a preview of other damaging testimony the committee will showcase down the line.

The former staffer, whose voice and identity the committee obscured, said they believed Twitter went easy on Trump for years because it “relished” the “power” of being his favorite platform.

“If former president Donald Trump were any other user on Twitter, he would have been permanently suspended a very long time ago,” the witness said in prerecorded testimony.

July 12

U.S. House Jan. 6 insurrection investigating committee members Liz Cheney (R-WY), Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) and Jamie Raskie (D-MD) are shown, left to right, in a file photo.

Politico, Jan. 6 panel reveals new details of Trump’s fringe-driven push to hold power, Nicholas Wu and Kyle Cheney, July 12, 2022. The select panel aired new testimony from the former president’s allies who urged him to concede the election in mid-December 2020.

Axios Sneak Peek, House Jan. 6 Hearing: “American carnage,” Alayna Treene, Hans Nichols and Zachary Basu, July 12, 2022. Situational awareness: The House Jan. 6 committee is expected to hold its eighth hearing a week from Thursday, choosing to delay it after new testimony from former White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Axios’ Andrew Solender scooped.

The Jan. 6 committee delivered another flood of revelations in its seventh hearing today, the first to feature a witness who participated in the Capitol attack and another who spent years as the spokesman for a far-right militia whose leader was charged with seditious conspiracy.

The big picture: “American carnage, that’s Donald Trump’s true legacy,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) argued at the end of the three-hour presentation, hearkening back to a famous line from the former president’s 2017 inauguration speech.
4 takeaways

1. “Civil war” threat: The committee revealed pro-Trump online spaces went into overdrive after Trump’s Dec. 19 tweet calling for a “big protest” in D.C. on Jan. 6, with Raskin reciting a stream of “openly homicidal” and “white nationalist” rhetoric related to rally planning.

On forums like TheDonald.win, users called on Trump supporters to bring body armor, bats, bear spray, zip ties and other weapons that Capitol rioters would later be charged with carrying.
“I think we need to quit mincing words and just talk about truths: What it was going to be was an armed revolution. … This could have been the spark that started a new civil war,” Jason Van Tatenhove, the former spokesman for the far-right Oath Keepers, testified to the committee.

2. Trump’s “ad libs”: A draft tweet memorialized in the National Archives indicated Trump had long planned to tell his followers to “march to the Capitol” after his speech at the Ellipse, which the committee claims undermines the defense that the rally simply “got out of hand.”

Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) revealed that Trump ad-libbed numerous lines during his speech — placing repeated emphasis on the call to march, the role of Vice President Mike Pence in “stopping the steal,” and the need for his supporters to “fight” and “have courage.”

Email from former Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson to Trump fundraiser Caroline Wren. Courtesy of Jan. 6 committee

3. Controlling the mob: Stephen Ayres, a former Trump supporter who pleaded guilty in June to disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building, testified that he and his associates hadn’t planned to go to the Capitol until Trump’s speech at the Ellipse “got everyone riled up.”

In addition, it was only after Trump’s video telling protesters to “go home” — hours into the riot — that the crowd dispersed: “I was hanging on every word he was saying,” Ayres said.

4. Cheney’s kicker: After the most recent hearing, Trump “tried to call” a witness who has not yet been heard from publicly, committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) revealed in one last bombshell at the close of her remarks.

The witness’s lawyer reached out to the committee, which subsequently supplied the information to the Justice Department, Cheney said — potentially escalating Trump’s exposure to a witness intimidation investigation.

Go deeper: Full recap, via Axios’ Alayna Treene

New York Times, Jan. 6 Panel Says Trump Spurred ‘a Violent Attack’ on Democracy, Luke Broadwater, Catie Edmondson and Katie Benner, July 12, 2022. The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack began laying out its findings on Tuesday about the violent domestic extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, and the role of former President Donald J. Trump in assembling the mob that disrupted the electoral count.

In a session that began Tuesday afternoon, led by Representatives Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, and Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, the panel is planning to document how, after Mr. Trump’s many efforts to overturn the 2020 election had failed, he and his allies began galvanizing a dangerous collection of supporters, including far-right militias, to descend on Washington as Congress met to confirm his defeat.

The panel is taking live testimony from Jason Van Tatenhove, a former spokesman for the far-right militia group the Oath Keepers; and Stephen Ayres, an Ohio man who joined the mob and recently pleaded guilty to illegally entering the Capitol on Jan. 6.

“Today the committee will explain how, as a part of his last-ditch effort to overturn the election and block the transfer of power, Donald Trump summoned a mob to Washington, D.C., and ultimately spurred that mob to wage a violent attack on our democracy,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi and the chairman of the committee.

The hearing aims to document the increasingly chaotic and desperate atmosphere inside the Trump White House after his loss as the president’s various attempts to stay in office fell flat. In particular, the panel plans to detail the involvement of members of Congress in the buildup to Jan. 6, including assisting Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Vice President Mike Pence to persuade him to overturn the election unilaterally.

A key focus is an extraordinary Oval Office meeting that took place on Dec. 18, 2020, in which Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser, Sidney Powell, a lawyer and conspiracy theorist, and Patrick Byrne, a wealthy business executive who funded many of the efforts to challenge the election, pitched Mr. Trump on extreme plans to keep him in power, such as seizing voting machines.

A little over an hour after that meeting ended, Mr. Trump posted a message to Twitter that began assembling a crowd to come to Washington for a rally on Jan. 6 that, the president wrote, would “be wild.”

The post sparked a chain of events, and prompted the right-wing chauvinist group the Proud Boys to begin planning for violence on Jan. 6. Along with the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the Q-Anon movement, which is based on a set of baseless conspiracy theories, will be a focus of the hearing.

The panel also plans to focus on how White House staff and close advisers to Mr. Trump received warnings that there could be violence on Jan. 6.

Mr. Raskin, who has developed an expertise on domestic violent extremist groups, has hinted that he will use Tuesday’s hearing to disclose evidence of more direct ties between Mr. Trump and far-right organizations, though he has declined to preview any. The panel plans to detail known links between extremist groups and the political operative Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Mr. Trump’s, and Mr. Flynn.

The hearing is the first since the explosive, surprise testimony last month by Cassidy Hutchinson, a junior-level aide in Mr. Trump’s White House who came forward to provide a damning account of the president’s actions on Jan. 6, 2021. She recounted how Mr. Trump, knowing his supporters were armed and threatening violence, urged them to march to the Capitol and sought to join them there, then declined to do anything to call off the mob during the brutal attack, sympathizing with the rioters as they chanted for Vice President Mike Pence’s execution.

The select committee has held seven public hearings to date, beginning with one last year in which it highlighted the testimonials of four police officers who battled the mob and helped secure the Capitol.

After conducting more than 1,000 interviews, the committee began a series of public hearings last month to lay out the findings of its investigation, including sessions on how Mr. Trump spread the lie of a stolen election and his pressure campaign against Mr. Pence, state officials and the Justice Department in a barrage of increasingly desperate efforts to overturn the election.

The committee’s next hearing, tentatively scheduled for next week, is expected to focus on Mr. Trump’s inaction for 187 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021, as violence raged at the Capitol and he resisted repeated entreaties to call off the mob, instead sympathizing with the rioters.

In the clips from his deposition, Barr has made clear that he saw Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud as patently absurd, noting several times that he had laughed out loud at some of the conspiracy theories being bandied about. But here he cuts to the heart of the effect of these theories: “I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn’t count.”

The committee cited a tweet by former President Trump that the Jan. 6 rally would “be wild.” The panel is also exploring his connection with far-right groups.

Politico, Parscale insisted the then-president’s rhetoric fueled the deadly event, Staff Report, July 12, 2022. Brad Parscale, shown above in a file photo from a Fox News appearance, texted Katrina Pierson about Donald Trump after the Jan. 6 attack: “This week I feel guilty for helping him win.”

What happened: The Jan. 6 committee revealed excerpts of explosive messages between Brad Parscale, one of former President Donald Trump’s prior campaign managers, and Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign spokesperson who helped plan the Jan. 6 rally at the Ellipse, in the hours immediately following the attack.

Here’s the exchange, which occurred in the 7:00 p.m. hour.

Parscale: This is about trump pushing for uncertainty in our country.

Parscale: A sitting president asking for civil war

Parscale: This week I feel guilty for helping him win

Pierson: You did what you felt right at the time and therefore it was right.

Parscale: Yeah. But a woman is dead

Pierson: You do realize this was going to happen

Parscale: Yeah. If I was trump and knew my rhetoric killed someone.

Pierson: It wasn’t the rhetoric.

Parscale: Katrina.

Parscale: Yes it was.

Washington Post, Live Updates: Today’s hearing focused on link between militants, White House, Jacqueline Alemany and Hannah Allam, July 12, 2022. The committee’s seventh public hearing is due to feature testimony from a former Oath Keeper and delve into origins of a Trump tweet; rump repeats baseless claims of election fraud hours before hearing; Part of Cipollone’s taped testimony from Friday to be aired; Judge rejects Bannon’s bid to delay trial, executive-privilege claim.

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection plans to hold its seventh public hearing on Tuesday, with an expected focus on the ways in which President Donald Trump and his allies summoned far-right militant groups to Washington as he grew increasingly desperate to hold on to power.

The hearing is likely to drill down on the period after states cast their electoral college votes on Dec. 14, 2020, action that confirmed Joe Biden’s victory. Trump, the committee is expected to argue, then shifted his focus to using the date of the congressional counting of the votes, Jan. 6, 2021, to block a peaceful transfer of power.

A committee aide said on a conference call with reporters Monday that the hearing will lay out the way that far-right militant groups such as the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers and others took cues from Trump and his allies. Particular attention will be paid to his Dec. 19, 2020, posting on Twitter: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted. “Be there, will be wild!”

The tweet served as “a pivotal moment that spurred a chain of events, including preplanning by the Proud Boys,” said the committee aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record. The tweet was issued “a little more than an hour after meeting with Rudy Giuliani, [retired Lt. Gen. Michael] Flynn, Sidney Powell and others where they consider taking actions like seizing voting machines, appointing a special counsel to investigate the election.”

New York Times, Jamie Raskin Brings Expertise on Right-Wing Extremism to Jan. 6 Inquiry, Luke Broadwater, July 12, 2022 (print ed.). The Maryland representative, right, who leads Tuesday’s Jan. 6 panel hearing, has spent five years delving into the rising threat of white supremacy.

When Representative Jamie Raskin enters a Capitol Hill hearing room on Tuesday to lay out what the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack has uncovered about the role of domestic extremists in the riot, it will be his latest — and potentially most important — step in a five-year effort to crush a dangerous movement.

Long before the Jan. 6, 2021, assault, Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, had thrown himself into stamping out the rise of white nationalism and domestic extremism in America. He trained his focus on the issue after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., five years ago. Since then, he has held teach-ins, led a multipart House investigation that exposed the lackluster federal effort to confront the threat, released intelligence assessments indicating that white supremacists have infiltrated law enforcement and strategized about ways to crack down on paramilitary groups.

Now, with millions of Americans expected to tune in, Mr. Raskin — along with Representative Stephanie Murphy, left, Democrat of Florida — is set to take a leading role in a hearing that promises to dig deeply into how far-right groups helped to orchestrate and carry out the Jan. 6 assault at the Capitol — and how they were brought together, incited and empowered by President Donald J. Trump.

July 11

Politico, Trump attorney Justin Clark interviewed with FBI last month, prosecutors say, Kyle Cheney, July 11, 2022. DOJ prosecutors revealed the June 29 FBI interview in a court filing connected to the criminal contempt case of Steve Bannon, who is set to go on trial July 18 for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee.

Former President Donald Trump’s attorney Justin Clark interviewed with federal investigators two weeks ago, the Justice Department revealed in a court filing early Monday morning, a significant development that could reverberate in multiple investigations facing Trump’s inner circle.

DOJ prosecutors revealed the June 29 FBI interview in a court filing connected to the criminal contempt case of Steve Bannon, who is set to go on trial July 18 for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 select committee. After stonewalling the committee for eight months, Bannon reversed course on Saturday, suggesting Trump had “waived” claims of executive privilege and permitted him to testify. Trump signed a letter supporting Bannon’s reversal and claimed to “waive” executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony.

But Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Vaughn said that Clark had confirmed in his June 29 interview what DOJ long suspected: that Trump had never invoked executive privilege to block Bannon from testifying.

“The Defendant’s timing suggests that the only thing that has really changed since he refused to comply with the subpoena in October 2021 is that he is finally about to face the consequences of his decision to default,” Vaughn wrote.

“All of the above-described circumstances suggest the Defendant’s sudden wish to testify is not a genuine effort to meet his obligations but a last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability.”

According to Vaughn, Clark contradicted multiple claims by Bannon and his defense team, which had long cited correspondence with Clark as the basis for Bannon’s contention that Trump had claimed executive privilege over Bannon’s testimony and records.

Instead, Vaughn said, Clark told DOJ “that the former President never invoked executive privilege over any particular information or materials; that the former President’s counsel never asked or was asked to attend the Defendant’s deposition before the Select Committee; that the Defendant’s attorney misrepresented to the Committee what the former President’s counsel had told the Defendant’s attorney; and that the former President’s counsel made clear to the Defendant’s attorney that the letter provided no basis for total noncompliance.”

Vaughn noted that DOJ provided Bannon’s team with an FBI report of Clark’s interview on June 30, the day after it was conducted.

It’s unclear if Clark was specifically interviewed about Bannon’s case or was brought in to discuss other matters DOJ is pursuing connected to Trump’s effort to overturn the election. Clark and Bannon attorney Robert Costello did not immediately return a request for comment.

The Jan. 6 select committee recently revealed that Clark interviewed with them as well, raising doubts about the Trump camp’s effort to send false slates of electors to Congress in December 2020, part of a multifaceted plan to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election.

Bannon’s attorneys indicated they were aware of Clark’s interview last week, citing it — without identifying Clark — as a reason to delay Bannon’s trial until October.

NBC News, Judge won’t delay Steve Bannon’s trial after his last-minute offer to cooperate with Jan. 6 panel, Ryan J. Reilly, July 11, 2022. The Trump associate, above right, is set to go on trial next Monday for contempt of Congress after he blew off the Jan. 6 committee’s subpoena.

A judge said Monday that he would not delay the contempt of Congress trial of Steve Bannon, just one week before it is set to begin.

Bannon was indicted last year for refusing to answer questions from the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Bannon, who had stonewalled the committee since October 2021, had a last-minute change of heart over the weekend, a decision his lawyer attributed to a letter from former President Donald Trump that waived a purported claim of executive privilege. The Justice Department maintains that Bannon’s offer to testify was nothing more than a “last-ditch attempt to avoid accountability.”

Trump’s own lawyer, Justin Clark, according to the Justice Department, told the FBI that Trump “never invoked executive privilege over any particular information or materials” and offered no basis for Bannon’s “total noncompliance” with his subpoena.

Judge Carl Nichols [a Trump nominated judge] issued a series of rulings on motions preparing for the trial Monday that largely did not go Bannon’s way, including knocking out several potential defenses he had raised. After the judge concluded, Bannon lawyer David Schoen said in the courtroom, “What is the point of going to trial here if there are no defenses?”

Nichols agreed, suggesting Bannon’s team consider that.

Nichols, who previously ruled that Bannon could not argue that he was not guilty because he was relying upon the advice of his lawyer, ruled Monday that Bannon cannot present evidence that he relied upon old opinions from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) regarding executive privilege either.

While expressing frustration with the precedent he is bound by, Nichols emphasized how low the bar was in the Bannon case. The government had only to illustrate that Bannon’s decision was deliberate and intentional, and not by accident.

Nichols also ruled out two affirmative defenses that he said Bannon could not use at trial.

The fact that Bannon was not a government employee at the time of the subpoena “dooms” any “entrapment by estoppel” defense, Nichols said, meaning that Bannon cannot argue that he ignored the subpoena and he believed his actions were legal because of instruction from a government official.

Because Donald Trump was a former government official, Nichols said, Bannon also could not rely upon a “public authority” defense, meaning that he thought he was acting upon the instructions of a government official and believed unlawful activity was authorized.

Nichols also said Bannon could not present evidence that the Jan. 6 committee was not properly formed due to the political balance of its members and that he and the jury would have to defer to the House’s interpretation of its own rules. Nichols cited the fact that the entire House had validated the House select committee.

The judge also said he would not allow evidence about any individuals who had not been prosecuted for contempt of Congress, such as Mark Meadows and Dan Scavino, Trump’s former White House chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, respectively.

And Nichols quashed Bannon’s subpoenas for members of Congress to provide testimony in the trial, citing the speech and debate clause of the U.S. Constitution. Much of the testimony and documents Bannon sought, Nichols said, would be barred.

Bannon was indicted in November 2021. Bannon used the purported executive privilege claim as a reason not to cooperate with the committee, despite the fact that he only worked at the White House for seven months in 2017, more than three years before the Jan. 6 attack at issue.

Palmer Report, Analysis: Judge refuses to delay trial and laughs Steve Bannon’s latest stunt out of court, Bill Palmer, right, July 11, 2022. When Steve Bannon made the last minute desperation move of having Donald Trump waive imaginary executive privilege between them that by law didn’t exist anyway, and then offered to testify to the January 6th Committee, it was pretty clear that if Bannon was just playing games it wouldn’t work.

Sure enough, earlier today the DOJ revealed that it was fully prepared for this nonsense, and had already gotten Trump’s lawyer to testify that Trump never even tried to grant Bannon executive privilege to begin with. Now the judge in the Bannon case is finishing off what little was left of Bannon’s stunt.

To give you an idea of how badly this is going for Steve Bannon, his biggest “win” today was when the judge granted his request that he be allowed to argue at trial that he believed his subpoena deadline had been extended. Given that Bannon won’t be able to produce any evidence to support this imaginary claim, it won’t help him in court anyway.

This is the latest reminder that federal criminal court isn’t Twitter or Steve Bannon’s podcast. Things work a certain way in court, and that doesn’t change just because the criminal defendant is a schemer who thinks he’s more clever than he is.

Palmer Report, Analysis: DOJ filing reveals Steve Bannon’s stunt has only made it worse for himself, Bill Palmer, July 11, 2022. So the DOJ is now revealing in court filings that it previously interviewed Donald Trump’s lawyer and determined that Trump never granted Bannon executive privilege to begin with. The DOJ also claims in a filing that Bannon’s lawyer lied to the January 6th Committee. As I said when Bannon first offered to testify, if he’s just playing games, he’s only making it worse for himself.

Because the DOJ has proof Trump never gave Bannon executive privilege, Trump’s new letter waiving that “privilege” could potentially be seen as obstruction. Trump and Bannon conspired to mislead investigators into believing that Trump had previously granted Bannon privilege.

The DOJ is also handing a big piece of leverage to the 1/6 committee, which can now use the credible threat of a criminal referral against Bannon’s lawyer to pressure him into cooperating. Attorney client privilege does not apply if attorney and client criminally conspired.

This also helps explain why Bannon’s lawyer recently had to announce he would no longer be representing Bannon in this criminal trial. As so often happens in Trump world, Bannon’s lawyer now needs a lawyer.

So where does this leave us? The DOJ is telling the court that it’s not taking Bannon’s testimony offer seriously, and is asking the judge to keep the stunt from the jury. So unless Bannon actually gives the 1/6 committee something of value, this is over. Predictably, Bannon hasn’t accomplished anything with this nonsensical last minute desperation move.

The only real question is whether there’s a point at which Bannon will realize he’s screwed, and that he’s indeed heading to prison, and cut an actual cooperation deal against Trump. Perhaps if he’s convicted this month at trial, he’ll get to that mindset. But short of legitimate cooperation, this is not helping him any. And the DOJ’s response suggests Bannon has merely made his legal situation even worse.

The movies have taught us that when someone has exhausted all viable options and tries a last minute desperation stunt, it usually works. But in the real world, such desperation stunts just tend to make things even worse for that person.

New York Times, Opinion: Merrick Garland Should Investigate Trump’s 2020 Election Schemes as a ‘Hub and Spoke’ Conspiracy, Andrew Weissmann (Shown above, a senior prosecutor in the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election), July 11, 2022. The tenacious work of the Jan. 6 committee has transformed how we think about the Jan. 6 rebellion. It should also transform the Justice Department’s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Before the hearings, federal agents and prosecutors were performing a classic “bottom up” criminal investigation of the Jan. 6 rioters, which means prosecuting the lowest-ranking members of a conspiracy, flipping people as it proceeds and following the evidence as high as it goes. It was what I did at the Justice Department for investigations of the Genovese and Colombo crime families, Enron and Volkswagen as well as for my part in the investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election led by the special counsel Robert Mueller.

But that is actually the wrong approach for investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. That approach sees the attack on the Capitol as a single event — an isolated riot, separate from other efforts by Donald Trump and his allies to overturn the election.

The hearings should inspire the Justice Department to rethink its approach: A myopic focus on the Jan. 6 riot is not the way to proceed if you are trying to follow the facts where they lead and to hold people “at any level” criminally accountable, as Attorney General Merrick Garland promised.

The evidence gathered in the hearings describes a multiprong conspiracy — what prosecutors term a hub and spoke conspiracy — in which the Ellipse speech by President Trump and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol were just one “spoke” of a grander scheme.

Washington Post, Opinion: Is a senator exempt from giving testimony in an election fraud probe? Laurence H. Tribe, Dennis Aftergut and Norman Eisen, July 11, 2022 (print ed.). Why is a local prosecutor dragging Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) into a Fulton County, Ga., grand jury?

On July 5, the judge overseeing a special grand jury approved a subpoena of Graham as part of an investigation into whether then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to corrupt the state’s role in the national election and steal the franchise of millions of Georgia voters.

Graham’s lawyers say the grand jury is a “fishing expedition.”

We say it’s anything but. From the perspective of a constitutional scholar, a criminal defense lawyer and a former federal prosecutor, the subpoena poses a big question for our democracy: Will the rule of law prevail — or are there some people who are just too important to ask to cooperate with a lawful state investigation into whether outsiders tried to use illegal means to overturn the results in a presidential election?

At center stage is a set of rules from the Constitution’s speech and debate clause. It provides that in all cases “except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace,” senators and representatives “shall not be questioned” outside of Congress “for any Speech or Debate in either House.”

The clause helps protect lawmakers’ freedom to express their thoughts and positions in the legislative process. But the immunity those rules confer is limited, or bounded, as lawyers say, to ensure that lawmakers do their jobs and not the bidding of external forces with potentially criminal goals of their own. Such as holding onto power regardless of the people’s will.

Graham, a lawyer himself, might or might not have been part of a criminal caper to mess with Georgia’s duly cast and fairly counted millions of ballots to help Trump steal the state’s 16 electoral votes. The Georgia judge approving the seven subpoenas issued on July 5 described the evidence as indicating “multi-state, coordinated efforts” to influence the November 2020 election results in Georgia and elsewhere.

Graham’s precise role remains unclear. We do know that in Trump’s call on Jan. 2, 2021, to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, the then-president pressured Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that did not exist — just enough to overturn the election. The hope was that flipping the outcome in Georgia would trigger similar actions in other battleground states and in sufficient numbers to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s electors four days later, on Jan. 6.

Graham telephoned Raffensperger on Nov. 13, 2020. The grand jury is entitled to hear sworn testimony about what was behind that call, what Graham sought by making it and who said what to which Georgia officials.

Raffensperger has said that in that call, Graham “questioned the validity of legally cast absentee ballots, in an effort to reverse President Trump’s narrow loss in the state,” as The Post reported. Raffensperger asserted that he understood the South Carolina senator to mean that the Georgia official should “‘[l]ook hard and see how many ballots you could throw out.’”

Graham has contested that account. Which interpretation reflects the truth? That’s for the Georgia grand jury to determine, by hearing all relevant testimony. The rule of law requires that those responsible for attacks on our nation’s democracy be held to account.

Graham can try to claim exemption under the constitution’s speech and debate clause, but, as an experienced attorney and lawmaker, he has surely read its words. The Supreme Court has long held that the provision’s specific language means that lawmakers such as Graham cannot use the clause as a pass to avoid testifying about crimes.

On July 6, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney issued a careful ruling denying claims parallel to what Graham is expected to argue. They were made in that case by Georgia state legislators seeking to quash their own subpoenas from the same grand jury. The court correctly cited Gravel v. United States, a 1972 Supreme Court case, as holding that the speech and debate clause does not “immunize a Senator or aide from testifying at trials or grand jury proceedings involving third-party crimes where the questions do not require testimony about or impugn a legislative act.”

The Georgia court also has made clear that the privilege ends “when a witness (or his staff) has engaged with [non-legislators] on topics relevant to the grand jury’s investigative charter.”

The central question in cases involving legislative privilege is whether requiring a lawmaker’s testimony would undermine the legislative function. By calling Raffensperger, Graham looks to have been engaging in political activity well outside any proper legislative function and, therefore, beyond the privilege’s protection.

Graham’s appearance before the grand jury is important not only to understanding the full extent of what happened in the alleged conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia. It also matters to a core tenet of our constitutional democracy. No one, including a senator or a president, is above the law.

Laurence H. Tribe is the Carl M. Loeb University Professor of constitutional Law emeritus at Harvard University. Dennis Aftergut is a former federal prosecutor. Norman Eisen is a senior fellow at Brookings and co-authored its report on Georgia’s Trump investigation.

 

Source: https://www.justice-integrity.org/1938-perfidy-personified-donald-trump-revelations-analyzed-by-dan-rather