Seven January 6 Hearings in Less than 3,000 Words

 

Seven January 6 Hearings   

There are any number of reasons you might not be watching every minute of the January 6 hearings. You may not know what they’re about. Slap yourself. You live in a democracy. Pay a little attention! You may be at work when hearings are broadcast, usually starting at 1 p.m. You may be working a second job to pay for gas to get to your first. You may be a Trump fan, unwilling to face hard facts. 

Here, as briefly as possible, we summarize the seven hearings, so far. Two key questions have been addressed. Two have been answered: 

1.     Was the 2020 election marred by rampant voter fraud? 

                     – and –   

2.     Who tried to steal the election?

 

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__________ 

The former head of the Justice Department testified that on Trump’s part, there was never any “indication of interest in what the actual facts were.” 

Bill Barr

__________ 

 

Mr. Barr, the former attorney general, appears only on video during hearings, but has been frequently seen. Investigators asked what he thought of Trump’s claims of a stolen election. Barr summed them up in one word: “Bullshit.” 

The former president still insists the election was stolen.

 

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Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers agreed to testify publicly. He voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020. When pressed to hold a special legislative hearing, and help Team Trump overturn Arizona’s voting results, he refused. 

“It would violate the oath [to the U.S. Constitution], the basic principles of republican government, and the rule of law,” he told the January 6 Committee, “if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”

 

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In the wake of Trump’s defeat, Alex Cannon, a lawyer for the Trump campaign, was tasked with finding proof of voter fraud in key states. When he could not, he said so. He cited Chris Krebs (below), another Trump appointee, to support his conclusions. 

Peter Navarro, a Trump toady, stormed into Cannon’s office and accused him of being an “agent of the Deep State.”

 

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On November 17, two weeks after the election, Chris Krebs weighed in on results. He had been Trump’s pick to head the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the Department of Homeland Security. In that position he had responsibility for ensuring the integrity of the vote. 

He said he stood by a previous statement agreed to by the heads CISA and multiple federal agencies: “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history.” 

“There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised,” Krebs reiterated.

Voting in a Pandemic Era.

 

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One of the craziest post-election voices to have the president’s ear belonged to General Michael T. Flynn. He was pushing Trump to declare martial law, seize the “rigged” voting machines – which none of the witnesses testifying under oath during these hearings believed were “rigged” – and (one would suppose) rerun elections until Trump got the results he desired. 

Flynn was forced to testify under threat of criminal contempt for ignoring a subpoena. A lawyer for the Committee asked him directly. “Do you believe in the peaceful transition of power?” 

The general replied, staggeringly, “Fifth.” During his reluctant appearance, Flynn took the Fifth Amendment more than 100 times.

 

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With the Trump reelection campaign floundering, and only 115 days remaining till the election, Bill Stepien took. He testified that on the night of the election, Rudy Giuliani began telling the president he should declare victory – and not wait for all the votes to be tallied. A cut of Jason Miller testifying, was inserted. Had anyone been drinking that night, anyone in meetings with Trump? 

“Uh, Rudy Giuliani,” Miller said. “He was definitely intoxicated.” 

Stepien opposed such a declaration. “It was far too early…ballots were still going to be counted for days,” if not weeks. “I always told the president the truth,” he said. “We’re going to have to wait to see how it turns out.” 

Miller also advised the president not to declare victory. 

In the early morning hours of November 4, Trump did just that. Appearing before a gathering of supporters, he angrily proclaimed, “Frankly, we did win this election.” 

Stepien was not optimistic. He said he believed the president had lost. The real numbers, he said, were “very, very, very bleak.” 

When both state and federal courts continued to knock down challenges made by Trump lawyers to the vote, voices of reason began to be drowned out. In 62 cases, Team Trump suffered 61 losses. Nevertheless, Rudy appeared on TV, screaming about hundreds of thousands of fake ballots being brought in in “garbage cans” and “shopping carts.” Sidney Powell was unleashed to make all kinds of wild claims. Matt Morgan, chief counsel for the campaign, explained that the president’s original lawyers began bowing out. “Law firms,” he testified, “were not comfortable with claims Rudy was making.” 

Stepien resigned his post. “I didn’t think that what was happening at that point was honest or professional.”

 

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Brad Raffensperger, Georgia Secretary of State, was on the receiving end of President Trump’s bonkers January 2, 2021, call. 

By that time, both Attorney General Barr and his replacement, Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, had informed the president that his claims of voter fraud were unsupported by fact. Yet, during that call, Trump asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes and give him the Georgia win. Trump insisted that a “suitcase” full of at least 18,000 votes had been rolled out in secret. He said those votes had been counted three times. Raffensperger pointed out that both the F.B.I. and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation had found that claim to be false. Trump switched attack. He said five thousand dead people had voted in Georgia. All for Biden! Raffensperger said that a careful check uncovered the true extent of the problem. Two dead had voted. 

Why, members of the Committee asked, had he – a Republican, who had supported Trump – been  unwilling to “find” the votes the president needed? The state had done three recounts, he testified. All showed Biden had won. “We didn’t have any votes to find,” he responded. “I had to be faithful to the Constitution.”

 

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In the days following the election, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, watched threats of violence escalate. Like Raffensperger, a Republican, and a Trump supporter, Sterling ended up pleading with Trump to cool his fiery rhetoric. “Someone’s going to get hurt, someone’s going to get shot, someone’s going to get killed,” he warned. “It’s not right.” 

The story of the “suitcase” full of votes came up. Sterling said investigators had watched 48 straight hours of video tape at the location where the “suitcase” was located. The story of the magic Biden votes, brought out in secret, and counted thrice, had been debunked. Yet, he admitted, facts didn’t matter. 

Trump’s lies were getting into “people’s hearts.”

 

* 

Bjay Pak, a Trump appointee, and U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, said his office looked into the story of the “suitcase” filled with Biden votes, and found it was an “official lock box.” 

“Nothing irregular” was found.

 

* 

Al Schmidt was the only Republican on the board that oversaw voting in Philadelphia, a city where Trump’s lawyers insisted there had been massive fraud. Giuliani was out there, claiming that 8,021 dead people had voted in Pennsylvania. Schmidt testified that “there wasn’t evidence of eight.” The president insisted that more people voted in the city than there were people living there. Schmidt said that was patently false. Barr, before he resigned, called that claim “absolute rubbish.”

 

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Perhaps the most eye-popping testimony of all came from Cassidy Hutchinson, former chief aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Not least of which was her story of an angry president throwing porcelain plates at walls, and her having to wipe ketchup off those walls. 

Like a number of witnesses, Hutchinson had served the administration from the beginning.  Her main strength as a witness was her ability to relate what she had heard others say. When the riot exploded on Capitol Hill, she saw White House Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone come “barreling down the hall.” He stormed into Meadows’ office and she followed. “People are going to get killed,” Cipollone warned Meadows, “and the blood will be on your f***ing hands.” 

Her most shocking reveal was this: On the morning of the riot, she testified, the White House was repeatedly warned that Trump supporters, including radical right-wing extremists, were gathering, many armed. Knives, pistols, AR-15s, pepper and bear spray, and even one man with a pitchfork, had been spotted. The president, she said, was informed. He grew angry – not because the lives of Americans might be at risk – but because searching people coming to hear him speak was taking too long. He feared the crowd might look small on television, as a result. 

“I don’t f***ing care if they have weapons,” Hutchinson heard him say. “They aren’t here to hurt me.” He demanded Secret Service agents “take the f***ing mags [magnetometers] away.” 

That request was denied.

 

* 

Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen had served in multiple capacities in the Trump administration. After Barr resigned, the president placed Rosen in charge at the Justice Department. 

Under questioning, Rosen noted that starting on December 23, up through January 3, the president pressed him daily (except Christmas). Trump asked Rosen to take a series of steps Rosen considered “inappropriate.” Finally, he insisted that Rosen sign and send a letter to seven key state legislatures, including this sentence: “At this time we have identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states, including the State of Georgia.” 

Rosen rebuffed the president’s entreaties. First, he testified, the letter was “not consistent with the truth.” 

Second, it was “not consistent with the Constitution. ” For most men and women of principle, that would clinch.

 

* 

Trump continued to press Justice to intervene, even though Barr and Rosen had both told him his allegations of fraud were unsupported by evidence. At a meeting on December 15, 2020, the president brought up the vote in Antrim County, Michigan. He had a report, he said, that proved there had been a 68% error rate in Antrim. That was possible only if the voting machines were rigged. 

Steven Engel, Chief Legal Counsel at DOJ told the Committee that he had examined all credible allegations, and to “this date,” the hearing date, he meant, there had been no evidence of widespread fraud.

 

* 

On December 27, 2020, Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue had a 90-minute phone conversation with the president, during which he took notes. Trump brought up Antrim County again, and aired a number of allegations. All, Donoghue noted, had been debunked. He said that he was “very blunt.” He said he “tried to correct him in a serial fashion.” A hand recount of the more than 15,000 votes in Antrim, for example, had shown the machines were off by a single vote, not by 68% as Trump said. “What people are telling you is not true,” he told him. Donoghue said he “tried to educate the president,” for his own good. 

(The Antrim vote, in the end, turned out to be off by 12.)

 

On January 3, Donoghue, Rosen, and Engel went to the White House for a showdown. 

They had learned that the president planned to fire Rosen, and replace him with a malleable human doughball, Acting Assistant AG, Jeffery Clark, whose specialty was environmental law. 

Donoghue informed the president that if Rosen was out, he would resign. He wouldn’t serve “one minute” under Clark. He warned Trump that almost all the top assistant AGs would quit next. Clark, he said, would be “leading a graveyard.” 

“Steve, you wouldn’t resign, would you?” Trump asked, turning to Engel. Engel explained to the Committee that he had worked for the administration for four years. “I couldn’t be part of this,” he told Trump.

 

* 

The January 6 Committee also subpoenaed Jeffrey Clark. Like Flynn and John Eastman (below), he balked. Under legal duress, Clark finally gave testimony. He took the Fifth, like Flynn, and Eastman, more than a hundred times.

 

* 

Thwarted in his plan to place Clark at the top of DOJ, Trump had one last desperate hope. He repeatedly pressed Vice President Pence to overturn the counting of the electoral votes on January 6, 2021. 

Dr. John Eastman, a constitutional scholar himself, had devised a far-fetched, secret plan by which Pence could do just that. Then slates of “alternate electors” would be seated, cast their votes for the incumbent, and voila, Donald J. Trump would enjoy a second, undeserved term in the White House. 

As might be expected, Eastman was subpoenaed and ordered to testify. He did his best to evade the subpoena, like people during the era of the “Black Plague” shunning those already infected. 

When forced to show up, he was asked to explain his actions, including floating a secret plan. According to other witnesses he had admitted the U.S. Supreme Court would likely shoot down that plan on a 7-2 vote, at best – and most likely blow it to bits with a unanimous 9-0 vote. 

“Fifth,” he replied to question after question. That is, he was pleading the Fifth. He did so 146 times.

 

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Professor Eastman was confronted by several members of the White House legal team. Eric Herschmann was brutally frank. He told Dr. Eastman his plan “made no sense.” No way would the Founding Fathers ever have given a vice president power to change the outcome of an election by fiat. 

When Eastman insisted that they had, Herschmann replied, “Are you out of your f***ing mind?”

 

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It wasn’t like the people in Trump’s ear didn’t know the castle they were building for the king rested on quicksand. Marc Short, chief of staff for Vice President Pence, testified that Mark Meadows admitted “a couple of times,” that he knew Pence had no such authority to toss electoral votes. Short agreed with that assessment. Under oath, he said he fielded a call from former House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan concurred. Pence did not have power to decide the vote.

 

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Greg Jacob, legal counsel to Mr. Pence, agreed. Eastman’s plan was a threat to democracy. “There was no way,” he told the January 6 Committee, that the Founding Fathers, who “abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.” 

That, he added, was “just common sense.”

 

*

The former vice president has not been asked to testify. On the morning of January 6, however, Jacob said Mr. Pence made it clear he would not do Trump’s bidding – he would not overturn a certified vote. According to Jacob, that morning, as Pence and his legal team prepared a final statement, the vice president remarked, “This may be the most important thing I ever say.” 

On June 25, 2021, in a speech to an audience at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Pence elaborated: 

Now, there are those in our party who believe that in my position as presiding officer over the joint session, that I possessed the authority to reject or return electoral votes certified by states. But the Constitution provides the vice president with no such authority before the joint session of Congress. And the truth is, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.

 

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Prior to making his final decision, Mr. Pence turned to Judge J. Michael Luttig for advice. Luttig, an esteemed legal scholar, called Trump’s repeated efforts to overturn election results “the most reckless, insidious, calamitous failures in both legal and political judgment in American history.” 

What happened on January 6, he added, was not the end of the danger. “Donald Trump and his allies and supporters,” the judge said, “are a clear and present danger to American democracy.”

 

* 

We know that Barr had told Trump, three times, by December 13, that the Justice Department found no real evidence of voter fraud. He called such claims, made by Trump, pushed by Giuliani and Powell, “crazy stuff.” Yet these claims had been “made in such a sensational way” that millions of Americans came to believe. Such repeated lies, Barr said (although he did not use the word “lies”) he warned the president, were “doing great, great disservice to the country.” 

Pat Cipollone, Chief White House Counsel, had balked at testifying, citing executive privilege. After Hutchinson appeared, he relented. He could not say what he told the president. Nor could he relate what Trump told him. So, he made his position clear in other ways. He was asked if he agreed with Barr’s assessment of the president’s claims (ongoing even now) of an election being stolen. Were such claims “bullshit?” 

“It is fair to say that I agreed with Attorney General Barr,” Cipollone replied. 

Then he asked to say more. Regarding Mr. Pence’s refusal to overturn the electoral count, he said, “I think the vice president did the right thing. I think he did the courageous thing…I think he did a great service for the country. I think I suggested to somebody that he should be given the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his actions.” 

(Not by Trump, of course.)

 

* 

And, so, here we are after seven hearings, covering roughly twenty hours, based on interviews with hundreds of witnesses, and review of thousands of documents. One hearing remains on the schedule. 

More may be necessary in the end. 

As for those two questions already mentioned, if you can interpret English, you can answer them yourself.