America in Crises...

 


The following is from LAWFARE and is an opinion on the success to date of the Select Congressional Committee investigating the insurrection attempt at our Capitol on J6 2021. The evidence is damning and it is this writers opinion that it could (and should) very well lead to several indictments. One being the ex president of the USA, Donald J. Trump. The evidence leaves absolutely no doubt but it was the ex president's intention to defraud the people of the United States of American by overturning the legitimate election results of 2020 that elected now President Joseph Biden to the presidency in a landslide popular and electoral college victory.

There was absolutely no evidence that there existed enough widespread election fraud that it would have resulted in a different outcome had there been zero. The great fraud was in fact Donald J. Trump's BIG LIE that the election was stolen.

We can only hope that the number of Americans believing Trump's Big Lie dwindles and they begin to see this country was but a hair breadth away from losing our democratic republic.

Note: The LAWFARE report has not been updated through the 7th hearing as of yet.


This post was last updated on June 29.

The Jan. 6 select committee has now held six public hearings in which it laid out its findings about the insurrection and the president who fomented it. The presentations in the hearings have been powerful, the recorded interviews compelling, and the rhetoric damning and often electrifying. The theater reviews are in, and the show is getting raves. 

But what’s left after stripping away the set dressing and focusing only on the evidence presented? Specifically, how much progress has the committee made in proving its case?

In the opening hearing on June 9, Chairman Bennie Thompson described the committee’s ambitions as follows: to provide “a true accounting of what happened [on Jan. 6] and what led to the attack on our Constitution and our democracy.” Vice Chair Liz Cheney said the committee would present a “seven-part plan overseen by President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election.” Committee members spelled out aspects of this plan in their presentation, and a committee source later clarified the seven components of the plan. 

In other words, the committee’s hearings should—at least in our view—be adjudged a success from an evidentiary point of view to precisely the extent that they would convince a reasonable person that: 

  1. Trump attempted to convince Americans that significant levels of fraud had stolen the election from him despite knowing that he had, in fact, lost the 2020 election; 
  2. Trump planned to remove and replace the attorney general and other Justice Department officials as part of an effort to pressure the department to spread his allegations of election fraud;
  3. Trump worked “to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to count electoral votes on January 6th”;
  4. Trump tried to convince state lawmakers and election officials to alter election results;
  5. Trump’s lawyers and other members of the president’s team directed Republicans in multiple states to produce fake electoral slates and send those slates to Congress and the National Archives; 
  6. Trump assembled a destructive group of rioters in Washington and sent them to the U.S. Capitol; and
  7. Trump ignored requests to speak out against the violence in real time and failed to act quickly to stop the attack and tell his supporters to depart the Capitol. 

The first hearing presented an overview of the evidence the committee collected, so it offered a bit of material in several of these baskets and sketched out the evidence members intended to present in a bunch of others. The second hearing, on June 13, was focused almost entirely on establishing the first point. The third hearing, on June 16, covered Trump’s pressure campaign directed at Pence. The fourth hearing, on June 21, outlined Trump’s efforts to push state lawmakers and election officials to change election results and generate fake electoral slates. The fifth hearing, on June 23, detailed Trump’s initiative to convince senior Justice Department officials to publicly support his claims of election fraud—and his effort to decapitate the Justice Department when they refused. And the sixth hearing, a surprise hearing held on June 28, focused on allegations made by former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson—who discussed the behavior of Trump and those close to the president on Jan. 6 and the days surrounding the insurrection. 

In this piece, which we will update on an ongoing basis as the hearings progress, we lay out what the committee has presented—or promised to present—on each of the seven points that make up its argument. 

Note that these seven points are emphatically not the elements of any known crime, though they may overlap with any of several crimes in important respects. Note as well that the committee is not following the federal rules of criminal or civil procedure in determining the admissibility of evidence. So it would be a mistake to assume that if the committee has established its case, that translates into anything for purposes of either criminal or civil liability. 

Rather, the committee in these hearings is telling a story with the seven points as a kind of table of contents of the story it wishes to tell. The public, in turn, gets to decide just how convincing that story is.

What follows is our effort at an evaluation. 

Continue Reading BELOW the FOLD.

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