Day five of the January 6 hearings focused on the senior Justice Department officials, Jeff Rosen (the acting Attorney General after Bill Barr resigned in December), Richard Donoghue and Steve Engel. Those three adamantly refused to go along with Trump’s final, desperate ploy before January 6 itself. That ploy involved Jeff Clark, an environmental lawyer at the Justice Department who became a conduit to Trump for some of the many conspiracy theories purporting to show that the election was stolen. Clark eventually volunteered himself to replace Rosen as acting AG, after which he would vigorously pursue investigations into all the harebrained claims of fraud swirling around Trump. In a tense Oval Office meeting on January 3, key Justice officials, including Donoghue and Engel, told Trump that Clark was pathetically unqualified to be the acting AG. They also told Trump that they would resign immediately if he replaced Rosen with Trump and that, indeed, there would be mass resignations throughout the Department. Trump blinked and decided not to fire Rosen. All that was left at that point was to try to stop the January 6 certification by force.
With that, a few bullet points:
Trump is a coward. Never forget that. He didn't pull the trigger on appointing Clark in that meeting on January 3, not because he thought it was a bad idea, but because he blinked in the face of a wall of opposition. That left him to incite a mob three days later, which he could do at a remove and without experiencing any pushback or immediate sense of consequences.
to reiterate what I said after the fourth hearing, the fact that the scheme was in many ways clownish and absurd doesn’t make it less dangerous. The specific allegations, reiterated throughout today’s hearing, are preposterous and easily disproven; there were more counted ballots than actual voters in Pennsylvania; a truck driver insists he drove a truckload of ballots from New York to Pennsylvania; an Italian satellite company uploaded software to voting machines to switch votes from Trump to Biden; tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of illegal votes were cast in Georgia and Arizona and Wisconsin; something involving the long dead Hugo Chavez. Everyone of these claims, however outlandish, was investigated by the Justice Department. Every one was baseless. None of this mattered to Trump, Clark, Giuliani, Eastman and other purveyors of this nonsense.
in the circumstances, Rosen, Donoghue, Engel and others did the right thing. They stood up to Trump and ultimately made him blink. How confident am I that if DeSantis or Trump wins in 2024 and faces defeat in 2028, that there won’t be a Justice Department full of Jeff Clarks, Eastmans, Giulianis to help them ‘stop the steal’? Not very.
hard not to notice that this parade of officials we’ve seen over the past two weeks is virtually all white and, with few exceptions, male.
credit to the two Republicans on the committee, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney. Kinzinger is a relative moderate. Cheney is not. Regardless, both have sacrificed their political careers for standing on principle. Kinzinger is not running for reelection this year. Cheney is going to lose her seat (badly). No one need feel sorry for either of them in a larger sense. They’ll both be fine. But these are ambitious people we’re talking about and they have essentially traded that ambition because they wouldn’t go along with Trump’s machinations. That so few have followed them highlights what’s admirable in their conduct. And if anyone thinks their actions set them up well for future political office, I’ll happily take out a bet.
Mark Meadows, the former North Carolina congressman and Trump’s final Chief of Staff was among those scheming with Clark to use the Justice Department as a launching pad for Trump’s coup. And of course, since for so many Republican elites, every accusation is a confession, as they say, Meadows is being investigated over *credible* evidence that he has committed voter fraud.
in 2020, Democrats experienced a substantial shrinking of the House majority they secured in 2018. Had a half dozen or so more seats flipped from blue to red in 2020, we wouldn’t be having these hearings at all. Instead, we’d be treated to a circus around whether Hunter Biden is the root of all evil. It’s another reminder of the razor’s edge our political system currently sits on. It’s also a reminder that almost the entire GOP has, tacitly or actively, endorsed Trump’s attempted coup.
A useful reminder from Joe Patrice that we shouldn’t take everybody at their word in these proceedings. Eric Herschmann, the White House legal adviser, has emerged as one of the more salty and entertaining figures in what are otherwise sober and somber hearings. Herschmann, who has a fondness for f-bombs (respect) is the one who told Eastman, on January 7 that he’d better get the best criminal attorney he could find. But Patrice reminds us that the day before, Herschmann was seen on video yukking it up with Don, Jr., Kimberly Guilfoyle and other would-be insurrectionists in the moments prior to the now-infamous rally where Trump, Eastman and others exhorted the mob to storm the Capitol. It strains credulity that Herschmann didn’t know what the purpose of that confab was. As Patrice says, “I’m all for people being late to the party, but it doesn’t really redound to his benefit as a legal advisor if he only figured out that Eastman was a loon after folks stormed the Capitol based on this nonsense.”
I’ll repeat what I said after the initial hearing. No one can say they know what the ultimate impact of the Committee’s work will be. But they’ve done a masterful job of establishing, piece by piece, the details of a coup attempt directed from the top and just how easily we could have had a far more dire outcome. Whatever our political differences, every small d democrat should be horrified at the prospect of a President seizing power after an election he lost, let alone one as dangerous and untethered by conscience as Trump. For its part, this committee is doing the very best it can to bring to light just how close to the brink we were. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld (sorry!), you fight with the political tools you have, not the ones you wish you had.
Speaking of the brink, it’s a near certainty that either today or next week the Supreme Court will issue its opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The Court is on the cusp of (or already in) a legitimation crisis. More about that next week. (teaser alert!).
Very cogent review.