By Ken Zino
Trump’s losing campaign manager William Stepien suddenly skipped the hearing this morning despite being subpoenaed. At the last moment he backed out because his wife went into labor, an excuse the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection accepted. In another twist of the sedition plot, Stepien is now a campaign adviser to the Trump-endorsed House candidate, Harriet Hageman, who is challenging Liz Cheney in the Wyoming Republican primary election.
The committee’s assertions the former president should face a landmark criminal indictment have also been supported by Monday’s live and videotaped testimony.
What I said after the opening hearing, that Trump had Motive, Means and Opportunity, might now give way to another journalistic truism -- Follow the Money. Trump was making money by promoting the Big Lie. As Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) said: “We’ll also show that the Trump campaign used these false claims of election fraud to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters who were told their donations were for the legal fight in the courts. But the Trump campaign didn’t use the money for that. The Big Lie was also a big rip off.”
This hot potato toss reminds me of the kids’ rhyme -- One subpoena, two subpoena, Or… Well, in my view this now stops at the Justice Department’s door. The evidence continues to build unchallenged.
Once again Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS) put it plainly in his opening. “… as someone who’s run for office a few times, I can tell you: At the end of a campaign, it all comes down to the numbers ... For the most part, the numbers don’t lie.
“But if something doesn’t add up with the numbers, you go to court to get resolution. And that’s the end of the line. Because those numbers aren’t just numbers. They are votes. They are your votes. And the very least we should expect from any person seeking a position of public trust is the acceptance of the will of the people — win or lose.
Donald J. Trump didn’t accept the will of the people. He didn’t have the numbers. Trump went to court, and he still didn’t have the numbers – he lost.
Trump’s nemesis, the honorable Rep. Cheney noted, “A federal court has already reviewed elements of the committee’s evidence on this point and said this: ‘In the months following the election, numerous credible sources – from the president’s inner circle to agency leadership and statisticians – informed President Trump and Dr. [John] Eastman that there was no evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the 2020 Presidential election.’” The court threw out the case.
“Today, you will hear much more from former Attorney General Bill Barr’s recorded testimony, and you will hear in greater detail what others in the department told President Trump – that his claims of election fraud were nonsense,” said Cheney.
Cheney’s summation to the jury of American voters:
“First, you will hear firsthand testimony that the president’s campaign advisors urged him to await the counting of votes and not to declare victory on election night. The president understood even before the election that many more Biden voters had voted by mail – because President Trump ignored the advice of his campaign experts and told his supporters only to vote in person... He falsely told the American people that the election was not legitimate…
“Second, pay attention to what Donald Trump and his legal team said repeatedly about Dominion voting machines – far flung conspiracies with a deceased Venezuelan communist allegedly pulling the strings.
“This was ‘complete nonsense,’ as Bill Barr said. Trump’s own campaign advisors, his Department of Justice, and his cybersecurity experts all told him the same thing...
“And third, as Mike Pence’s staff started to get a sense for what Donald Trump had planned for January 6, they called the campaign experts to give them a briefing on election fraud and all the other election claims.
“On January 2, the general counsel of the Trump campaign, Matthew Morgan – this is the campaign’s chief lawyer -- summarized what the campaign had concluded weeks earlier – that none of the arguments about fraud or anything else could actually change the outcome of the election.”
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Also on this page ...
•Reaction from our Twitter poll on whether the first public hearing of The U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol was effective or not worth watching, in the left and right columns, respectively. Read the center column for results of the poll.
•“Another View to the Coup,” our center-column analysis of that first 1/6 panel public hearing from last Thursday evening, with commentary by Eric Blair and Ken Zino in the left column and Stephen Macaulay in the right column.