Jan 6 Hearings

JohnInCarolina

Figure we can use a dedicated thread over here.  Seems little chance the discussion on the main board will last much longer.  

Have at it.  

lousubcap

Not having at it other than to post the near-term TV schedule:
" January 6 hearings schedule:

"Significant updates:

1. Upcoming Hearings. Next week will include three hearings which reportedly will focus on the following topics and hear testimony from the following witnesses.

Hearing 2, June 13, 10am ET:
Topic: The spread of the Big Lie.
Witnesses: Former Fox News staffer Chris Stirewalt. 

Hearing 3, June 15, 10am ET:
Topic: Efforts to pressure and weaponize the Justice Department.
Witnesses: Former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, and former United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Steve Engel.

Hearing 4, June 16, 1pm ET:
Topic: Trump’s efforts to pressure VP Mike Pence to stop or delay the certification of the election.
Witnesses: Greg Jacob, the former chief counsel to the vice president will reportedly testify. Pence’s former chief of staff Marc Short is expected to be called to testify presumably for the same hearing."

JohnInCarolina

One aspect I don’t see on the agenda but that I hope gets some examination concerns the very wealthy backers behind the protests.  Many of the people at the protest were able to attend because all of their travel expenses were taken care of, including nights in the Trump hotel at rates over several thousand dollars a night.

lousubcap

Good point.  I recall there will be six public hearings so perhaps your concern will be addressed then.  One can hope.  

HeavyG

I hope the involvement/efforts of Ginni Thomas in the whole "Stop the Steal" bs which prompted the attack on the Capitol are given more light. Last I read the committee wasn't likely to bring her in to testify, however, they should at least weave her actions into the narrative.

dbCooper

Very interested in knowing who were the members of congress that sought a presidential pardon for their Jan 6 related activities.  My understanding is their names and the evidence of their request will be disclosed during these hearings.

dmchicago

dbCooper said:

Very interested in knowing who were the members of congress that sought a presidential pardon for their Jan 6 related activities.  My understanding is their names and the evidence of their request will be disclosed during these hearings.

All they’ll say is they knew that there would be a democrat witch hunt and they wanted protection from the “unselect “ committee. 

Botch

Can you say "grift"?  $250M in donations, to fight voter fraud that doesn't exist.  

AnothaStolenGenrator

Botch said:

Can you say "grift"?  $250M in donations, to fight voter fraud that doesn't exist.  

That seems to be maybe illegal.  

dmchicago

Yeah, I just saw a small snippet. If we lived in a real "law and order" world, Trump would be toast. But we don't, so I'm not sure the outcome will be satisfying to those of us that know what a lying, grifting fuc&tard he is.

lousubcap

And for your reading pleasure: From the Atlantic-

"In the meantime, buckle in for what will likely be a tumultuous week centered on more hearings from the January 6 committee.

The first hearing, last week, began to lay out the case not only that January 6 was an attempted coup against the United States and its Constitution but that senior figures in Washington knew that it was coming. They knew that Donald Trump’s arguments of a falsified election were nonsense—“****,” according to former Attorney General William Barr—and yet they stood by while Trump encouraged a mob to march on the Capitol anyway.

We’ll likely see more such evidence this week, but even over the weekend, the hits kept coming: We learned that Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, was deeply involved in the attempt to get the election overturned and that Vice President Mike Pence issued ordersto the military while under siege.

These are both problems. And they would be serious scandals if America were still a country capable of being scandalized.

In an earlier time, Ginni Thomas’s behavior might have been enough for a justice to step down. Justice Thomas apparently couldn’t care less; he won’t even bother to recuse himself from election-related Court decisions. Meanwhile, we now know that the vice president of the United States was in hiding, calling for troops to come to his aid, while crowds howled about hanging him—and the commander in chief himself sat in the White House saying, in effect, that maybe Pence deserved to be strung up.

By the way, **** Cheney did something similar to Pence when Cheney began issuing orders during 9/11. Cheney had no formal authority to do so, either, but he could at least argue that he was acting with the president’s knowledge in order to assist in the defense of the United States against a foreign enemy. Pence was trying to save his own life—and the life of the speaker, the majority leader, and other senior officials—from a crowd sent by the president himself.

This is all infuriating and even terrifying, but the question that worries me most is whether any of it will matter.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad the January 6 committee is pursuing this investigation and naming names. I want the institutions of American democracy to fight back against the seditionists and others who have failed their duty to the Constitution. It’s good at least to see the former Fox News politics editor Chris Stirewalt tell the House on live television, as he did this morning, that the winner of the 2020 presidential election was “Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. of the great state of Delaware.”

But I wonder if the committee is going to overcome the stubborn denialism of millions of my fellow citizens and the stupefying indifference of millions more.

Americans are being faced with the undeniable evidence that senior members of the United States government either plotted or abetted a coup. They have been told that the military chain of command was in chaos for hours. This is far beyond Watergate or Iran-Contra; this is an attack on more than two centuries of constitutional government."

Legume

5 years from now Florida and Texas will be rejecting history textbooks that mentions any of this.

HeavyG

Legume said:

5 years from now Florida and Texas will be rejecting history textbooks that mentions any of this.

That comment made me laugh and cry.   :(

So on point. Well done!

The Cen-Tex Smoker

Legume said:

5 years from now Florida and Texas will be rejecting history textbooks that mentions any of this.

This is 100% true btw. Critical Coup Theory. 

AnothaStolenGenrator

http://twitter.com/January6thCmte/status/1536815728208355330?s=20&t=_x3Yh8yAyr8JtR2_glTalQ

SamIAm2

HeavyG said:

Legume said:

5 years from now Florida and Texas will be rejecting history textbooks that mentions any of this.

That comment made me laugh and cry.   :(

So on point. Well done!

@Legume, @HeavyG  This worries me. 

A new political action committee has formed attempting to draft Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president in 2024, and it is being run by a Republican consultant heavyweight who has been a veteran of campaigns involving former GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  "Ready for Ron PAC" 

I don't even want him to be Governor of Florida again. 

Botch

Rep Loudermilk (R-GA) is looking particularly bad right now, giving a two-hour-longer-than-normal tour of the Capitol, on a COVID day that was supposed to be closed, and providing extensive photographic access to security checkpoints, tunnels, and nondescript stairwells.  
Dammit.   

Botch

SamIAm2 said:
A new political action committee has formed attempting to draft Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to run for president in 2024, and it is being run by a Republican consultant heavyweight who has been a veteran of campaigns involving former GOP Presidents Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.  "Ready for Ron PAC" 

I don't even want him to be Governor of Florida again. 

The last quote I heard there were twenty GOP hopefuls thinking of running  for the WH.  I hope that the GOP realizes what happened 6 years ago and only allows 3 or 4 GOPs to run/debate.
Last time there were seventeen GOP candidates, and all had between 1 and 4% of the total support, including traitor.  Then, two things happened in short succession: traitor's "grab-'em" tape came out, and he blurted out his "criminals, rapists" comment during a rally; well, he's out, I thought.
Wrong.  Suddenly he had 20% of the approval, while everyone else was still struggling with 1 to 4%.  A koch brother withdrew his financial backing from Bush, stating "I'll be damned if I'm spending that kind of money and not getting anything out of it!".  I'll remember this quote for the rest of my life.
I started panicking as the field thinned, then eventually accepted the fact that Hillary would be my next president.  Wrong again.  
I hope the GOP run it differently this time (although deSantis frightens me too).  I expect, if he doesn't get the R nomination, Trump will run 3rd-party and we'll be stuck again with Biden, who's trying to do the right thing and often does, but does NOT have the inspirational quality that we really, really need these days, like a Kennedy, Reagan or Obama.  
We live in Interesting Times.  

lousubcap

3rd party candidates re killers. 1992 and GHW Bush with Perot and Clinton.  I'm convinced based on the post-mortem that Perot sucked ("That sucking sound") enough votes from Bush to swing the election to Clinton.  
Could be worse-Cheeto one more time!

Botch

Exactly.  

StillH2OEgger

My best, albeit unlikely scenario would involve neither Trump nor Biden running again. There has never been a better time to just start over from scratch. But I'm not holding my breath.

AnothaStolenGenrator

StillH2OEgger said:

My best, albeit unlikely scenario would involve neither Trump nor Biden running again. There has never been a better time to just start over from scratch. But I'm not holding my breath.

Who are some politicians you'd like to see run on either side?

StillH2OEgger

That's the rub. I leaned republican in the past, but was always moderate and just haven't found much to like about the party for several cycles now so I'm left hoping for a moderate democrat who can win. If Biden had just run four years earlier we could have nipped the Trump crime family in the bud.

I really like Amy Klobuchar, who is smart but not smarmy (a local favorite for me), but I don't think she can win a national election. I don't have a lot of confidence Biden or Harris can win in 2024 and that is a little scary for me that we could end up with a more emboldened Trump. So to answer your question, I don't know.

AnothaStolenGenrator

StillH2OEgger said:

That's the rub. I leaned republican in the past, but was always moderate and just haven't found much to like about the party for several cycles now so I'm left hoping for a moderate democrat who can win. If Biden had just run four years earlier we could have nipped the Trump crime family in the bud.

I really like Amy Klobuchar, who is smart but not smarmy (a local favorite for me), but I don't think she can win a national election. I don't have a lot of confidence Biden or Harris can win in 2024 and that is a little scary for me that we could end up with a more emboldened Trump. So to answer your question, I don't know.

On my side I lean Dem but wouldn't mind seeing Larry Hogan run on the GOP side.  
I don't think Biden is anywhere near as bad as his favorability ratings.  He's paying the price for high gas prices and inflation that he doesn't have much control over.  But the public doesn't care.
Agree with you on Harris.

Botch

Hogan's my hope, too.  

dmchicago

Another brutal day. 

dbCooper

For those that favor the right, and maybe moreso for those that favor the left, this read about the mayor of Miami should be insightful...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/20/miami-mayor-francis-suarez-republican-rising-star/

EggaddictArnold

dmchicago

dbCooper said:

For those that favor the right, and maybe moreso for those that favor the left, this read about the mayor of Miami should be insightful...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/20/miami-mayor-francis-suarez-republican-rising-star/

Interesting read. I'm hoping for a different (former) Mayor

lousubcap

Next January 6th committee hearing, June 21st, 1 PM EDT.  
General outline-
"Though there's still much unknown about what the next Jan. 6 hearings may reveal, but Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., laid out a loose framework for what we might expect. 

Tuesday's hearing will examine the pressure Trump and his allies placed on state level officials to overturn the election results, according to Cheney."

lousubcap

An article from The Atlantic that I had to copy as I could not get access to a link:
"

TUESDAY, JUNE 21, 2022 ∙ SUPPORTING SPONSOR: IBM

Tom Nichols CONTRIBUTING WRITER

As more truths about Donald Trump and his attempted coup come out, I fear there will be more irrational anger and threats from people who cannot bear the truth. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic. Beware the luxury beach resort. Russia has a plan for Ukraine. It looks like Chechnya. This president did everything right and still got no thanks.

Secret Doubt Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and Georgia Secretary of State Chief Operating Officer Gabriel Sterling are sworn in during the fourth hearing of the January 6 committee. (Michael Reynolds-Pool / Getty) As the January 6 hearings restarted today after the long weekend, I was thinking about the weird, psychotic fear that has overtaken millions of Americans. I include in those millions people who are near and dear to me, friends I have known for years who now seem to speak a different language, a kind of Fox-infused, Gish Galloping, “what-about” patois that makes no sense even if you slow it down or add punctuation. Such conversations are just part of life in divided America now. We live in a democracy, and there’s no law (nor should there be) against the willing suffocation of one’s own brain cells with television and the internet. But living in an alternate reality is unhealthy—and dangerous, as I realized yet again while watching the January 6 committee hearings and listening to the stories of Republicans, such as Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and others, describing the threats and harassment they have received for doing their duty to the Constitution. And the threats don’t stop with political figures; families are now in the crosshairs. Representative Adam Kinzinger, for example, tweeted Monday about a letter he received in which the writer threatened not only to kill him, but to kill his wife and infant son. There have always been unstable people in America, and they have always done frightening things. But there seem to be a lot more of them now. Some of them are genuinely dangerous, but many more are just rage-drunk nihilists who will threaten any public figures targeted by their preferred television hosts or websites, regardless of party or policy. The more I think about it—and I spent years researching such problems while writing a book about democracy—the more I think that such people are less angry than they are terrified. Many of you will respond: Of course they’re terrified. They’re scared of demographic change, of cultural shifts, of being looked down upon for being older and uneducated in an increasingly young and educated world. All true. But I think there’s more to it. I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves. We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason. These outlets are eager to oblige. It’s not you, the hosts assure the viewers. It’s them. You made the right decisions years ago and no matter how much it now seems that you were fooled and conned, you are on the side of right and justice. This therapy works for as long as the patient is glued to the television or computer screen. The moment someone like Bowers or Kinzinger or Liz Cheney appears and attacks the lie, the anxiety and embarrassment rise like reflux in the throat, and it must be stopped, even if it means threatening to kill the messenger. No one who truly believes they are right threatens to hurt anyone for expressing a contrary view. The snarling threat of violence never comes from people who calmly believe they are in the right. It is always the instant resort of the bully who feels the hot flush of shame rising in the cheeks and the cold rock of fear dropping in the pit of the stomach." Today's hearing was a moral compass event.  You either have one or you don't!