Well it's come to this on the third day of the January 6th Committee hearings: As Chris Hayes pointed out last night we now know Trump wanted to have Mike Pence killed. Killed by a ruthless, foaming -at -the -mouth mob he had incited and assembled - then sicced on Pence. Don't believe it? Then you either didn't watch this third hearing or didn't pay attention.
Trump was told repeatedly that his wacko plan to overturn the 2020 election was unlawful, according to witnesses and testimony from his closest advisers. Yet in the final days before Congress was due to certify the election results the orange imp increased his public and private pressure campaign on his loyal lieutenant to do his bidding. He believed if only Pence refused to certify the electoral votes he could grab 4 more years and piss on the will of the American people. Nearly 80 million of whom finally had seen enough of this two-legged turd to eject him after two impeachments could not.
“What the president wanted the vice-president to do was not just wrong, it was illegal and unconstitutional,” Congresswoman Liz Cheney, a Republican of Wyoming and the committee’s vice-chair, said on Thursday.
Squeezed between a president who refused to accept defeat and a Constitution that provided him no such power to change the course of the election (as L. Michael Luttig advised him as a former federal judge) , Pence chose the Constitution. Of course, as Lawrence O'Donnell observed in a post -hearing MSNBC panel discussion, Pence ought to have made this clear on December 6th - a full month earlier. Then the unhinged mob of Trumper slime might not have assembled at all, even if Trump dog-whistled.
Greg Jacob, who served as counsel to Pence when he was vice-president, told the panel that Eastman’s plot to nullify the results of the 2020 election was unlawful from its conception – and Eastman knew it. Well Eastman too ought to be hung by now as a damned traitor. But instead the sorry-ass worm pleaded the fifth over a hundred times, as we saw in a number of clips after the formal hearings (on MSNBC).
During a meeting with Eastman on January 4th, Jacob testified that the roach “acknowledged” that the strategy would violate the Electoral Count Act, the 19th-century law that Trump pressured Pence to exploit. (Even the WSJ - in an editorial today- admits this ancient leftover needs to be updated so no VP has to go through this shit again) . In an exchange the next day, Eastman conceded that if the supreme court heard a challenge to his interpretation of the act, it would have been rejected, 9-0.
The second witness, retired judge and informal Pence adviser J. Michael Luttig, said that if Pence had obeyed, it would have plunged the nation into its “first constitutional crisis since the founding of the Republic”.
“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,” the staid former judge said. True, and those of us watching only wished he had spoken his piece with a bit more rapid cadence! But hey, we're all slow - in speech, thought, and walking - as we age!
A federal judge ruled in March that Trump and Eastman “more likely than not” had committed felonies in their efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including obstructing the work of Congress and conspiring to defraud the American people. The committee showed a clip of Trump White House attorney Eric Herschmann testifying that he told Eastman, “get a great effing criminal defense lawyer – you’re gonna need it.”
The committee provided an almost-cinematic accounting of the infamous call between Trump and Pence on the morning of January 6th that turned “pretty heated”, according to Ivanka Trump who was in the Oval Office with her siblings during the exchange. “It was a different tone than I heard him take with the vice-president before.” Well uh, yeah, when a president calls you a "pussy" and a "wimp" you know you're not in his good graces! (A top aide to Ivanka testified that Trump called Pence “the p-word” during the call.)
Early drafts of the speech Trump delivered at a rally on the Ellipse before the riot, when he encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell” for his presidency, included no reference to the vice-president, Aguilar said. But Trump changed the remarks to sharply criticize Pence, imploring him to find the “courage” to overturn the election. He then implored the mob that he needed to be pressured to do so. All that was needed then was for the loathsome Proud Boys and Oath keepers to pierce the protective perimeter of the Capitol and allow the mob - with their gallows, nooses, bear spray and other weapons - to pour into the Capitol screeching for Pence's (and Nancy Pelosi's) blood. And as Rachel Maddow pointed out on the MSNBC panel, they likely would have slaughtered any representative they found, especially a Dem.
The committee also played testimony showing that Trump was told of the violence breaking out in his name at the Capitol before he tweeted at 2.24pm that Pence did not have the “courage to do what should have been done”. In the moments after Trump sent the tweet, the crowds both inside and outside “surged” and overwhelmed law enforcement officers- beating them into pools of blood, vomit and bear spray - as Caroline Edwards attested to in the first hearing. WHO is responsible for this carnage? Trump! Who now needs a date for his hanging.
A montage played during the hearing showed rioters threatening to drag Pence through the streets and chanting “bring out Pence” and “hang Mike Pence” near where a gallows had been erected outside the Capitol. That was not a prop, as Maddow noted, it could well have functioned as your basic gallows and instead of cockroaches like Tucker Carlson belittling the hearings because "not that many died" and "there were no mass shootings" we could well have seen a bloodbath.
When given the opportunity to depart the Capitol, Jacob testified that he and others with Pence that day were ready to leave but Pence refused. He testified that Pence was “determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day, that it was his constitutional duty to see through”.
While the violence raged above, Trump never called to check on his vice-president, hunkering down in a Capitol garage- while texting furiously. Why would Trump have? Why would he care what happened to Pence? The fucker was enjoying the spectacle of mayhem unfolding on his big screen TV.
The committee displayed an email from Eastman to Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, sent days after the Capitol riot asking to be put on a potential list to receive a presidential pardon. A pardon was never granted.
Relying on emails written by Eastman, the committee argued that the law professor knew the scheme involving an alternative slate of electors from a handful of states Trump was disputing was unlawful. But he nevertheless presented it to the White House as a viable course of action as early as December 13 2020, according to emails released in court filings.
Crucially, however, the state legislatures had still not met by that date to certify an alternate Trump slate of electors. Eastman showed in emails he knew that event needed to happen in order for his multi-part scheme to have any chance of success. But the easiest path would have been just to have Pence spirited from the Capitol under the guise of protection by the Secret Service. Then, with him gone -- say "flown to Alaska" in the words of Chris Hayes- Trump could declare martial law or use some other subterfuge to claim power. Happens all the time in overseas foreign coups. It happened in Grenada in 1983 leading the U.S. to intervene with Operation Urgent Fury.
This was the primary reason Trump knowingly incited the murderous mob- shown in assorted clips- including one bearded MAGA ape who swore he was "going to kill this motherfucker Pence". Why? Because he "betrayed Trump" and "cost him four more years." The idea would then be to scare Pence so much that he bailed out into a waiting van to which many of his aides already fled. But Pence wasn't biting. He knew if he fled, left the Capitol, it was all over. So instead he remained out of sight, but within 40 feet of the howling mob of Trumper psychotics. (Who Kim Strassel claims - see below- would find real conservatives "appalled. Well, Kim, maybe they weren't "real conservatives"!)
Even borrowed underground in a Capitol garage, furiously texting to try to get security help (or National Guard) to the Capitol, Pence was abandoned by his president. The odious bastard traitor Trump did nothing - merely sat glued to his jumbo TV relishing the melee and the threat to his second's life.
Did Trump know what he was doing? Know the peril in which he put Mike Pence? Of course he did! Only a certified moron would think otherwise. For this reason Trump deserves nothing more than a hangman's noose. He's a traitor who cannot and must not be allowed to repeat this attempted coup in two years! Meanwhile, Americans - those with more than air between the ears- need to ensure his swamp monkey Reeptards (now using the inflation bogey) don't get voted back into power in the fall - paving the way for his return!
This is no idle worry! For a reality check to see how far up their asses Americans heads are buried check out this right off this a.m.'s news transom:
"As Biden Polls Hit New Lows More Americans Say They'd Vote For Trump'
The survey of 1,541 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 10-13, found that if another presidential election were held today, more registered voters say they would cast ballots for Donald Trump (44%) than for Biden (42%) — even though the House Jan. 6 committee has spent the last week linking Trump to what it called a “seditious conspiracy” to overturn the 2020 election and laying the groundwork for possible criminal prosecution. "
"Good Germans", distracted and distressed by Weimar hyper-inflation, chose Hitler to lead them and flushed their democracy into the sewer. Will too many Americans now do the same? Will they buy into the fecal slop of WSJ hack Kim Strassel and her portrayal of the hearings as "docudrama", e.g.
And conflating the "firebombing" of an anti-abortion "pregnancy center" in Portland, OR with the firebombing of a nation's laws and Constitution? One wonders, and at the same time fears for the future of this nation as the lies, numbness and normalizing of political atrocity piles up.
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by Heather Digby Parton | June 18, 2022 - 7:17am | permalink
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