Daily Archives: July 25, 2022

In each of the public hearings held by the House select committee investigating Jan. 6, a few standout moments have captured the public's attention. Thursday's prime-time hearing was no different, with a clip of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley immediately taking over social media.

While previous hearingsexplored the rioters, Trump's speech at the Ellipse preceding the riot, and other aspects of his actions after the November 2020 election, the eighth hearing held this summer focused on the 187 minutes of then-President Donald Trump's inaction while rioters descended on the Capitol. Committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney said there could be more hearings this fall.

Twitter users quickly set the clip of Hawley running to a variety of soundtracks but there were a few other moments in the committee's hearing that also made a mark.

A White House employee told President Trump about the riot "as soon as he returned" to the Oval Office from his speech at the Ellipse, said Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria but no records exist of what happened for much of that afternoon. Luria said the Presidential Daily Diary was silent; the chief White House photographer was told "no photographs" and the official White House call logs don't show Trump "receiving or placing a call" until almost 7 p.m.

Luria said Trump went to a private dining room next to the Oval Office and stayed there from 1:25 p.m. until after 4 p.m. Witnesses told the committee that Trump sat at the head of the table, facing a television hanging on the wall.

"We know from the employee that the TV was tuned to Fox News all afternoon," Luria said, adding that other witnesses confirmed Trump was in the dining room with the TV on during that time.

The committee's 3D graphic of the West Wing highlighted the location of the dining room, complete with footage from Fox News on the TV.

After the riot began, Vice President Mike Pence retreated from the Senate chamber to his office in the Capitol. His security detail debated their next move, heard during the hearing as the committee played recordings of their radio transmissions. But that wasn't all that was happening.

Members of Pence's detail, in fear for their own lives, began making calls to family members to say goodbye, said an anonymous security official in recorded testimony.

"The members of the VP detail at this time were starting to fear for their own lives," the anonymous official testified. "There were a lot of there was a lot of yelling, a lot of I don't know a lot of very personal calls over the radio," the person testified. "So it was disturbing. I don't like talking about it, but there were calls to say good-bye to family members and so forth. It was getting for whatever the reason was on the ground, the VP detail thought that this was about to get very ugly."

The committee shared never-before-seen raw footage of Trump on Jan. 7 recording a video message condemning the violence on Jan. 6. In it, he argues with his daughter Ivanka, who helps him edit his remarks in real-time, and slams the podium and refuses to say parts of the speech.

"I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack yesterday, and to those who broke the law, you will pay," Trump said in the footage. "You do not represent our movement, you do not represent our country, and if you broke the law can't say that. I already said you will pay "

"But this election is now over. Congress has certified the results," he continued, before stopping to argue with parts of the prepared text. "I don't want to say the election's over. I just want to say Congress has certified the results without saying the election's over."

The committee showed a famous photograph of Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, raising his fist toward Trump's supporters gathered outside the Capitol early in the day on Jan. 6.

That gesture stuck with an unnamed Capitol Police officer, Luria said. It riled up the crowd, the officer told the committee, "And it bothered her greatly because he was doing it in a safe space, protected by the officers and the barriers," Luria said of the officer.

But it was Hawley's later flight from the Capitol after the mob entered illustrated with a clip from security footage of him running across a hallway, then replayed in slow motion before a different clip showed him running down the stairs that became one of the most talked-about moments of the night. Later clips shared on Twitter showed people in attendance at the committee hearing reacting with laughter.

The committee also revealed texts from Trump campaign officials Tim Murtagh, Trump's director of communications, and one of his deputies, Matthew Wolking, criticizing the president's treatment of the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, who died on Jan. 7, 2021 after being injured in the riot.

"Also shitty not to have even acknowledged the death of the Capitol Police officer," Murtagh wrote to Wolking.

Wolking responded, "That is enraging to me. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie."

Murtagh replied, "You know what this is, of course. If he acknowledged the dead cop, he'd be implicitly faulting the mob. And he won't do that, because they're his people. And he would also be close to acknowledging that what he lit at the rally got out of control. No way he acknowledges something that could ultimately be called his fault. No way."

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Josh Hawley video, Trump's outtakes and Secret Service farewells: Top ...

Then-President Donald Trump is seen on the screen above the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on Thursday in outtakes from his Jan. 7, 2021, video in which he refused to say he had lost the election. Win McNamee/Getty Images hide caption

Then-President Donald Trump is seen on the screen above the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection on Thursday in outtakes from his Jan. 7, 2021, video in which he refused to say he had lost the election.

Even before Liz Cheney made her announcement this week, another autumn of Donald Trump dominating the political scene seemed inevitable.

But now, it's official.

Cheney, the vice chair of the House Select Committee Investigating the January 6 Attack on the Capitol, made a great deal of news in the panel's public hearing Thursday night not least by revealing the hearings would resume after the August recess.

"See you all in September," the Wyoming Republican said.

Truth is, even if the committee had wrapped this week, the former president would still be looming over the fall landscape like a rising harvest moon.

The House committee has had much to do with that, serving up the cream of its evidence in eight hearings that might have been episodes in a streaming TV series. The season-ender Thursday night was a three-hour special and arguably its most dramatic to date.

Mixing live testimony and riveting videotape, the panel took us back to the 187 minutes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump, then still president, refused to do anything to halt the invasion.

Even as the protesters became rioters, breaching the closed Capitol and shouting "Hang Mike Pence," and even as Pence's Secret Service detail feared for their lives, Trump sat in a dining room off the Oval Office. He watched the mayhem while phoning senators he thought might still help him overturn the results of the election he had lost.

We also saw the president struggling to tape a video the next day, complaining: "I don't want to say the election's over."

So the panel's Season Two will drop in a matter of weeks. But even if the hearings were over and done, the consequences would only be beginning.

There would still need to be a final report and a decision on making a criminal referral. That would leave the question of indicting the former president in the hands of the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland (who might also indict based on Justice's own investigation).

The latest polling indicates more than half the country is paying at least some attention to the January 6 panel's prosecutorial presentations. And while relatively few Americans expected to see Trump indicted before the hearings began (and 6 in 10 still don't), half the country now says he should be. That's the key takeaway from the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll this week.

If Trump is indicted, the process of his arraignment, pleading, pretrial motions and trial will be as big a news story as a presidential election. And it may drag on nearly as long, or seem to.

If he is not indicted, Trump will declare himself exonerated and treat the entire episode as a triumph. Wags have suggested he might even propose making Jan. 6th a holiday. But short of that, he could call what happened "legitimate political discourse" the phrase actually used this spring by the Trump-dominated Republican National Committee.

Trump claimed exoneration when he was twice impeached by the House but not convicted by two-thirds of the Senate. That was also his reaction to the report from independent counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe in 2019.

Mueller had been assigned by the Justice Department in 2017 to look into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. He found plenty, but said the evidence of direct involvement by Trump's campaign was not sufficient to indict.

As for other crimes, such as obstruction of justice, Mueller cited a Justice Department opinion that the president could not be indicted while in office.

Trump promptly labeled the troubling Mueller report a "total exoneration" because it found no "collusion" a term Mueller had never used. It is not hard to imagine Trump doing something similar if none of the current Jan. 6 probes results in his being indicted for a crime.

But even without the legal drama, there are other reasons Trump will be as prevalent as pumpkins this fall in fact, thousands of reasons.

Trump himself will not be on the ballot, but all 435 seats in the House and 35 seats in the Senate will be. There will also be scores of statewide offices and thousands of state legislative seats to be determined around the country. Trump has been active in the primaries in dozens of states, endorsing some Republicans and not others, hailing some as heroes and ripping others as RINOs.

With his signature high volume and profile, Trump will largely define the autumn ambience. Trump and Trumpism will connect all these separate contests, much as they have in the last three election cycles (2016, 2018 and 2020) and as they could do again in 2024. That would be the fifth federal cycle in a row to be certifiably Trumpified.

Trump has said he has made his decision regarding another presidential campaign and is now deciding when to announce it. But it is possible the atmosphere around the panel's first eight hearings could alter the former president's timetable. If he were to announce early, before the midterms, would that change the calculus for Garland?

Earlier this week, the attorney general referred to a legal memo associated with his predecessor, William Barr, regarding the "political sensitivities" of investigating candidates at certain times. But later in the week, Garland made a clear statement that "no one is above the law."

Either way, Trump's real or potential criminal exposure is not the focus GOP strategists would prefer for the 2022 midterms, which by all that's normal should be about the current president. That would be President Joe Biden, currently suffering from a case of COVID, historically low approval ratings and historically high gas prices.

It is a longstanding presumption that midterm elections are referenda on the president and the party holding the White House. That is partly because the "out" party has less to defend and everything to attack. But there have been exceptions.

In 2002, President George W. Bush managed to turn the midterms into a test of Democrats' willingness to green light his "war on terror," including what became a war in Iraq (and a new Department of Homeland Security where staff would not have their usual employee rights).

In 1998, President Bill Clinton made the midterms a test of public sentiment on his own pending impeachment. House Republicans who counted on a big win that November got a modest setback instead.

Right now, Trump is threatening to change the subject from Biden's travails to his own grievances about 2020.

By one accounting, more than 120 Republicans who have actively promoted Trump's fictions about the 2020 election have already won their primaries for offices that would give them a say in conducting the elections in 2024 and thereafter.

They include Dan Cox, a hardcore conservative state legislator who won the gubernatorial primary in Maryland last week. Cox is a 2020 election denier endorsed by Trump. He defeated a woman who ran with the blessing of the state's current Republican governor, Larry Hogan, a longtime Trump antagonist who has talked of running for president himself.

Another prominent example is State Sen. Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, who won that state's GOP nomination for governor. Mastriano was prominent on an "alternative slate" of Trump electors who tried to be counted in the Electoral College. He has made his role in that episode a part of his campaign.

Meanwhile, Trump has continued to harass election officials around the country about the 2020 results.

This past week, he called the Republican speaker of the Assembly in Wisconsin to demand the legislature there "decertify" the 2020 election. Trump had heard the Wisconsin State Supreme Court had outlawed some of the drop-off boxes for absentee ballots in this fall's coming election and assumed, or asserted, that meant all the drop-box votes from 2020 would be thrown out.

Trump will have plenty of help keeping the pot boiling this fall. There will be more hearings, and Cheney promised there will be still more revelations because "doors have opened, new subpoenas have been issued and the dam has begun to break."

Moreover, the stream of literature that continues to highlight the worst aspects of Trump's effect on the American body politic shows little sign of abating. Next up is Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, whose book due in August will argue the last 25 years of Republican Party politics set the stage for Trump and Jan. 6.

Waiting on deck are some other heavy hitters who have been assessing the Trump phenomenon. They include the formidable team of Peter Baker (New York Times) and Susan Glasser (The New Yorker), whose book is due in September, and the Times' Maggie Haberman, the reporter perhaps best known for her long-running contact with Trump through his career.

What more can these books tell us? We will await their appearance. But beyond adding to the pile of Trump tomes, they will be expected to add to the pyre that will be burning through the fall.

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As Jan. 6 panel pauses, the U.S. faces a fourth fall of Trump (with a fifth in view) - NPR

They rallied on Friday in a bunting-clad arena wearing Still my president T-shirts, offering wild conspiracies about the last election and certainty that Trump would win the next one.

For them, Pence and every vestige of the old, establishment wing of the GOP is in the past.

He was a good guy, one attendee said.

I dont have an opinion on [Pence], said another, who was eager to persuade Trump to head up a liquidation of the federal government if elected.

Leaving the rally with her 11-year-old grandson and stopping for a T-shirt that was too big for him, but that he said he could tuck in Georgianna Bruso said she didnt even know Pence was in the state.

Pence was, indeed, there having come to the state to support Karrin Taylor Robson, who is running for the Republican nomination for governor against the Trump-endorsed Kari Lake, who still insists, falsely, that Trump won the election in 2020.

But even the setting of the stop underscored how tilted this proxy-battle would be.

The former vice president appeared with Robson in Maricopa County, where Trump supporters conducted an audit of the last election that was derided by honest observers as a farce.

Its the largest county in Arizona, the state where Ron Watkins, a celebrity in the QAnon conspiracy world suspected of being Q, is running for Congress.

Earlier this week, the state Republican Party censured Arizonas Republican state House speaker, Rusty Bowers, for testifying to the Jan. 6 committee about Trumps efforts to overturn the election. Walt Blackman, a Republican state lawmaker running for Congress, recently made headlines for his suggestion that abortion is tied to efforts to exterminate Black people.

In parts of Arizona, said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran Republican strategist based in Phoenix, you can say some crazy shit and still be viable.

Or win a statewide party primary.

To Trumps supporters, it doesnt matter how much damage was inflicted on the state party during his tenure. Republicans lost two Senate seats and a presidential race for the first time since 1996.

It was the prospect that he would run again that they were cheering when they arrived. And it wouldnt change Trumps supporters minds about him if his preferred candidate for governor, Lake, loses to Pences choice in the primary on Aug. 2.

Some said they wouldnt believe it if she did. Lake herself has suggested she might not accept the results of her election a line derived from the Trump playbook.

In the run-up to Trumps rally with Lake, Stan Barnes, a former state lawmaker and longtime Republican consultant, described the Trump and Pence appearances in Arizona as like some sort of celestial planet lineup that you witness every millennium Thats what it feels like on the ground in Arizona.

What was happening, he added, was a slow-motion, real-time tearing of the fabric in the Republican Party thats there for us to see. We have Donald Trump doing his thing with his candidate The voters in the Republican Party in Arizona may not be aware of this yet, but theyre not just choosing a candidate to represent the party in the general election. Theyre choosing the actual direction of the party.

But when asked if Trump could come out a loser either way, Barnes said, No, I dont think so.

Robson, the wealthy real estate developer and former member of the states board of regents, has refused to say that the 2020 election was stolen. But in a nod to Trump, she has said she doesnt think the election was fair. She has drawn closer to Lake, the early frontrunner in the primary, not by criticizing her for falsehoods about the 2020 election a centerpiece of Lakes campaign but by depicting her as an inauthentic conservative.

On Friday, she criticized Lake for donating to Barack Obama, while Pence, appearing alongside her, said, Arizona Republicans dont need a governor that supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

For the most consequential schism in the GOP between its pro-Trump and pro-democracy wings that isnt much of a litmus test.

Has it been a full-throated defense of the election that was run in the state of Arizona in 2020? asked Bill Gates, a Republican Maricopa County supervisor. No, thats not what shes done. I think shes thrown some red meat to folks, but she has purposefully not gone all in and off the deep end.

Even that, he said, is important, because I think the majority of candidates in our party have.

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Trump and Pence squared off in the desert. It was one-sided. - POLITICO

The protest places yet another unfavorable spotlight on what has become a source of sharp criticism for Trump. His and his familys ties to the Saudis and his association with LIV has come against the backdrop of a renewed push for the U.S. to more fully distance itself from the country over its human rights record. President Joe Biden himself faced recent criticism for visiting Saudi Arabia after vowing to make the nation a pariah.

Trump appears to understand the sensitivity too. Eagleson, whose father, John Bruce Eagleson died in the South Tower on Sept. 11, said a representative for Trump personally called him yesterday in response to a letter his group sent relaying its deep pain and anger over the decision to host two different inaugural LIV golf events.

The aide, according to Eagleson, said Trump had read their letter, and told Eagleson 9/11 is really near and dear to him and its so important to him he is going to remember everyone who signed the letter and he personally told this individual to reach out.

But, Eagleson said, it was of little to no value.

My response is, if it was so important to him why did he tell you to call me, why didnt he call himself? he added. [The aide] just kept repeating the same talking points, one being that the contract is binding and there is no way out of it. And when I pressed on when [the contract] was signed, she said she didnt know and just continued to say that the President was flattered with the letter, which was a weird thing to say, since it was not a very flattering letter. It called him a hypocrite essentially.

In addition to the letter, 9/11 Justice has also requested a meeting with Trump ahead of the tournament to express their concerns and discuss Saudi Arabias role in the 9/11 attacks. The group is particularly focused on showing the public a clear connection between the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Saudi government. They point to newly declassified documents related to the U.S. governments investigation of the attacks and suspected official Saudi support for the hijackers as providing clear evidence of the nations role that day. Fifteen of the 19 al Qaeda terrorists who hijacked planes on 9/11 were Saudi nationals.

The groups letter to Trump noted that he himself blamed Saudi Arabia for the attack during a 2016 interview on Fox News.

The Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment.

The tournament that is set to kick off on Friday at Trump National Golf Course in Bedminster is LIVs second U.S event. The tour is backed by the Public Investment Fund, Saudi Arabias sovereign wealth fund that is chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who U.S. intel has blamed for the gruesome death of a Washington Post columnist. It has not been without controversy since its inception. Critics of the LIV Invitational Series say it is an attempt by the Saudis to sports-wash their record on human rights.

And the golf series has split the golf community too, pitting the PGA against LIV, which is being led by golf legend Greg Norman. Pro golfers who have decided to join LIV reportedly accepting as much as $200 million in signing bonuses have been suspended from PGA Tour events, though are still permitted to participate in the four yearly major tournaments.

Trump responded to that ban on Truth Social, and encouraged pro golfers to go ahead and join LIV.

All of those golfers that remain loyal to the very disloyal PGA, in all of its different forms, will pay a big price when the inevitable MERGER with LIV comes, and you get nothing but a big thank you from PGA officials who are making Millions of Dollars a year, Trump said on his social media platform. If you dont take the money now, you will get nothing after the merger takes place, and only say how smart the original signees were.

Trumps decision to host the LIV series at two of his clubs (Doral in Miami will host the other) comes after the PGA decided days after the Jan. 6 riots on Capitol Hill to terminate an agreement to play the 2022 PGA Championship at Trump Bedminster.

Eagleson said 9/11 families have been beside ourselves over Trumps decision.

We cant imagine that the president, knowing what he knows and with his history on this, would host and facilitate the Saudi government have this tournament literally 50 miles from ground zero in a state where 750 were murdered, said Eagleson.

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Trump world reaches out to 9/11 families on eve of their LIV golf protest - POLITICO

But publicly, Trump lied.

He lied at the gathering of the worlds elite in Davos, Switzerland on January 22, saying, Its one person coming in from China. We have it under control. Its going to be just fine. He lied days later in Michigan, declaring that everythings going to be great and falsely claiming, We pretty much shut it down coming in from China. He later said the virus was going to have a very good ending for it. And with an eye toward Wall Street, he lied to the entrepreneurs in India, declaring as far as what were doing with the new virus, I think that were doing a great job.

But the markets fell again that day Trump spoke in New Delhi, creating their biggest two-day slide in four years, and things were about to get worse. None of Trumps magic words would prevent the Dow from losing 37 percent of its value from February to March, shocking the market when it dropped almost 3,000 points on March 16 its worst single-day plummet in history.

Those final days of February 2020 set the tone for the rest of Trumps terrible year. Joe Bidens turnaround on Super Tuesday in early March robbed him of his socialist foil, Bernie Sanders. Days later, Trumps shaky Oval Office address on the coronavirus did little to reassure a jittery nation. His blustery social media posts didnt move the needle either the virus, after all, didnt have a Twitter account. And in the coming months, the racial reckoning following the death of George Floyd would underscore just how out of touch Trump was with Black Americans.

Over the summer, the president who had equivocated about the violent white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., found himself in a bunker under the executive mansion when a small fire ignited at nearby St. Johns Episcopal Church during protests in Lafayette Park. When the bunker move leaked to the press, Trump exploded with anger for fear that it made him look weak. He horrified much of the nation by using the military and federal police to clear nonviolent demonstrators from the park, posing for an awkward photo-op in front of the damaged church, bible in hand.

By October, Trumps lies about COVID caught up with him when he was hospitalized, ill with a potentially deadly disease after nearly a year of flouting the rules, believing that wearing a mask would, as he told aides, make him look like a pussy.

After he was discharged from Walter Reed, and with the lighting just so, Trump strode up the steps to the Truman Balcony. Though still highly contagious, he tore off his mask before stepping inside. Reporters on the lawn, though, noticed something odd: Trump immediately backtracked out to the balcony again before returning inside, as if recreating his entrance. And thats what he did: He was using the moment to film a video marking his so-called triumph over COVID.

Dont be afraid of COVID. Dont let it dominate your life, Trump said.

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The One Time Trump Couldn't Lie His Way Out of a Crisis - POLITICO

After eight congressional hearings investigating the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, one thing is clear: there is enough evidence to prosecute Donald Trump on a variety of charges. The committee has the option to refer cases to the Justice Department for prosecution, but such a step is not necessary. The Justice Department could decide to prosecute at any time, on whichever charges for which they find sufficient evidence. Already more than 800 people have been charged in connection with the January 6 eventsalthough most have been charged with lesser crimes. So far only 50 have pleaded guilty to felony charges.

But all along, the issue has been not what the 10,000 people who came to Washington D.C. for the rally knew or even what the 2,000 people who made it inside the Capitol building knew. All along the issue has been what did the president know and what did he intend? Was this a rally that simply got out of control? Or was it the first attempt ever by an American president to stage a coup detat?

If it was an attempted coup, it was a pretty pathetic and incompetent one.

From the hearings, we now know that Trump did not even have the support of his own family and friends nor his handpicked White House staff. To pursue his plans, he had to rely on a close group of advisors known as the clown show led by Rudi Giuliani, a pillow manufacturer, and a dot-com millionairenone of whom was in government and none of whom controlled the most important assets (guns, tanks, planes etc.) needed to take over a government. In contrast to most successful coups in history, Trump had no faction of the military, no faction of the National Guard, and no faction of the District of Colombia Metropolitan Police at his disposal.

As we learned in some of the most recent hearings, it was Vice President Mike Pence who was in contact with the military and the police, and most importantly, the military and the police were taking orders from Pence not Trump, the commander in chief! During the entire 187 minutes between Trump calling for the mob to march to the Capitol and his meek video gently asking the mob to go home, he made no calls to the military, the National Guard, or the Metropolitan police. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley was surprised that Trump never called him. Did Donald Trump really think that 2,000 people, many of whom were unarmed, could take control of the Capitol against a mobilized law enforcement and militarywhich, while late, did show up? Did Trump really think that a riot so dangerous that it sent one of his most loyal supporters, Sen. Josh Hawley running for his life through the halls of Congress would have the Republican backing needed to succeed? Did Trump really think that a riot could force Congressional leaders who were, by then, in secure locations in the Capitol Complex along with Vice President Pence, to delay their constitutional duties?

But an incompetent coup attempt could still be treasondefined as the betrayal of ones own country by attempting to overthrow the government through waging war against the state or materially aiding its enemies. Many will argue that Trump committed treason, particularly because the definition of treason simply requires the attempt not success in overthrowing the government. However, there are other grounds to prosecute him. He could be prosecuted for obstructing an official proceeding in his efforts to block the Electoral College vote. He could be prosecuted for conspiracy to defraud the United States for his various schemes to overturn the election. He could be prosecuted for dereliction of duty for his refusal to intervene to stop the attack on the Capitol. He could be prosecuted for inciting an insurrection. Section 3 of the 14th amendment which was passed after the Civil War to keep Confederates out of office could be used to keep him from ever running for office again. It provides: No person shall hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same.

For some, the decision to prosecute is easy; no one is above the law, including Donald Trump, and the decision to prosecute should be based solely on evidence. But for others, prosecuting a former President of the United States whose followers maintain an almost cult-like loyalty to him is a decision with enormous consequences. Would a successful prosecution and perhaps jail time make Donald Trump a martyr and exacerbate the ugly divisions he has launched on the country? Prosecution would take place under the Biden Administrations Justice Department which would, no doubt give birth to even more violent conspiracy theorists.

Is the end game really to put the guy in jail or is it, as Rep. Liz Cheney has maintained from the beginning, to make sure that Trump is never within 1000 feet of the presidency again?

The hearings themselves, absent any prosecutions, seem to be weakening Trump. A recent NYT/Sienna poll had Florida Governor Ron DeSantis moving into a strong second place behind Trump among 2024 Republican primary voters. The article points out that His share of the Republican primary electorate is less than Hillary Clintons among Democrats was at the outset of the 2016 race, when she was viewed as the inevitable front-runner, but ultimately found herself embroiled in a protracted primary against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. And in the Republican primaries for Congress to date Trump has a mixed record. His endorsed candidates have won some high-profile racessuch as the Republican Senate primary in Ohio and lost others such as the Republican gubernatorial and secretary of state primaries in Georgia.

Prosecuting Trump is not a simple matter of determining whether the evidence is there. It is a question embedded in the larger issue of how to restore and defend American democracy. The January 6 committee has done an admirable job so far arguing that Trump is not fit for office. They have led. In an ideal world the voters would follow with the final word.

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Should Donald Trump be prosecuted? - Brookings Institution

TAMPA, Fla.Former President Donald Trump took center stage Saturday night for day two of Turning Point USA's 'Student Action Summit'.

The Summit is all about mobilizing young people to not just join the Republican Party but also start organizations aimed at reaching more young people.

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk led a panel discussion with three young republicans running for office, Florida's Anthony Sabotini, Anna Paulina Luna, and New Hampshire's Karoline Leavittt.

Kirk and the panelists spoke about voting out Democrats and longstanding Republicans to usher in a new wave of the Republican Party.

You just heard from three young Republican leaders. To the older Republican Party, if youre watching, your time is up, Kirk said.

The second half of the day brought out Donald Trump Jr. and his fiance Kimberly Guilfoyle. Day two of the summit wrapped with an hour and a half long speech from former President Donald Trump.

Young people love us. They love our policies. They love common sense, he said.

President Trump spoke at length about his time as president. The former president said the future of the Republican Party is bright with the mobilization of more young people.

Your generation will not let them do what they want to do to you, which is bad, bad things. Were going to very soon take back our country, he said.

An Axios Generation Lab Next Cities Index found Tampa is the second most sought-after city for young Republicans.

ABC Action News Political Analyst Dr. Susan McManus said summits like this one is how younger Republicans are making their voices heard.

"It's just a conservative are historically a lot quieter. And they're not really too much into protesting. They're more about these kinds of actions. And forming these groups on campus have like-minded students to go out and talk to other students. And that's a big difference," she said.

Dr. McManus says the world of politics is evolving on both sides, and it's all because of young people.

"Both the Republican and the Democratic Parties have really growing and very strong young components. And a lot of that reflects that the younger generations are now replacing the boomers and the older ones. And they're bringing in a whole different kind of energy, a whole different way of communicating, totally different set of priorities. But both parties, young people in both parties really just want to make the country better. They just have different ways of going about it," she added.

She said now is the time for the Democratic Party to mobilize.

"Democrats know that they have to start reaching their younger population and breaking into the independence. And here you have the Republicans say look right here in Tampa, Florida, we've got 5,000 young people who are conservatives to the nth degree who are going back to their high schools and colleges and going to start getting people engaged. This is a big moment for Republican young people as well as the Democratic young they are emboldened by both parties needing them."

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Former President Trump headlines Turning Point USA's 'Student Action Summit' in Tampa - ABC Action News Tampa Bay

In a certain sense, you almost have to admire Boris Johnson. Please note: I said "almost." In his final appearance last week for the always-entertaining ritual performance of Prime Minister's Questions before the House of Commons (seriously, watch it sometime if you're inclined to believe the British are unfailingly polite), Johnson seemed exactly the same as ever a mischievous, intelligent and unreliable schoolboy, overstuffed with expensive chocolates, entirely unrepentant and largely upbeat only days after having been driven to resign by his own party in one of the most humiliating political collapses of recent history.

And from his blas, Oxbridge, upper-class-wag, profoundly narcissistic point of view, why not? What Johnson told the honorable members in Westminster was pretty much true (which is a point to keep in mind as we go on): He had conquered the dominant political party in Britain and re-engineered it, pulling in large numbers of working-class voters in the north of England for the first time and leading the Tories (i.e., the Conservative Party) to their largest electoral majority since the days of Margaret Thatcher. He had accomplished the seemingly impossible and quite likely undesirable task of extracting the U.K. from the European Union (i.e., Brexit), something his own party hadn't previously much wanted to happen.

Johnson's unasked and unanswered question during that performance was obvious to all: Given how awesome I am and how much I have accomplished in just three years, why in the name of Sweeney Todd are you chucking me out? He ended on a simultaneously ludicrous and threatening note that even his worst enemies would have to admit was vintage Johnson, winding up his peroration to the House with: "Mission largely accomplished for now. Hasta la vista, baby!"

Let me revert for a moment to resisting the impulse to admire someone possessed of enough thoroughly unearned self-confidence to quote George W. Bush and the Terminator in a single soundbite. Whew! Let's move on: Whatever effect Johnson was looking for, he got it. Within hours, even respectable media outlets like the BBC, the Guardian and the Wall Street Journal felt compelled to follow the lead of the right-wing London tabloids and game out scenarios for Johnson's immediate or eventual comeback, while admitting, almost in passing, that under Britain's parliamentary system that outcome was somewhere between wildly unlikely and completely impossible.

One right-wing tabloid promised a "shock poll" revealing that 85% wanted Johnson to stay on as prime minister. It was a poll of the tabloid's online readers.

On the website for the Express, probably the British daily that most reliably represents pro-Boris working-class Tory voters, the top three stories on Saturday evening (and four of the top five) were all variations on the theme of "Boris Johnson's incredible comeback," as one nearly substance-free article breathlessly put it. (It comprised 16 sentences of prose, several of them cribbed from earlier coverage, spread among six or seven photographs of Johnson.)

Another Express article promised a "shock poll" of Johnson's popularity, finding that "85% still want him as PM." Which would indeed have been a shock if it hadn't been an online poll of angry people reading Boris Johnson content on Express.co.uk, rendering it about as rigorous as a poll of hungry foxes asking whether they prefer live chicken or cold tofu or, rather more to the point, a poll of Fox News viewers asking them to choose between a Donald Trump dictatorship and a seven-hour lecture on veganism delivered with painstaking attention to gender pronouns.

Several of these articles, at the Express and elsewhere, have quoted outraged Johnson supporters (largely unnamed) describing the parliamentary infighting that drove him from power as a "coup" or a form of "impeachment," and observing that the entire process of ousting and replacing Johnson was undemocratic. First of all, those terms were imported piecemeal, and without much attention to detail, from contemporary American discourse, which is something of a tell.

Second of all, there's some justice to those observations, to be fair. But you have to wonder what country those people thought they were living in, and whether they believe they get to change the system just by whining about it. (And, goodness gracious, wherever would they have gotten such an idea?)

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Sometimes British prime ministers are removed from power through elections, to be sure. But at least as often it happens through an intra-party coup or a process approximately similar to impeachment, and especially so within the Conservative Party. (The Tories haven't lost a national election since 2005, but have gone through plenty of internal drama during that time.) That's exactly what happened to Johnson's two predecessors, Theresa May and David Cameron. That's what happened to Maggie Thatcher in 1990. It's pretty much what happened to the most revered Tory PM of all, Winston Churchill, who was forced to "retire," not altogether voluntarily, in 1955.

It's hardly a secret that the British parliamentary system is at best an indirect form of democracy, and that the prime minister is not elected by the voters at large. He or she is leader of the party that controls a majority in Parliament, and until recently was chosen by the other elected members of Parliament from that party, with zero public input.

While both the Tories and the center-left Labour Party have "democratized" that process lately, both have been eager to avoid anything resembling the chaotic scramble of the American primary system. Johnson's replacement as Tory leader (and, in effect, prime minister) will be chosen by an electorate of roughly 160,000 registered members of the Conservative Party or about 0.3% of all U.K. voters but only after the party's MPs have whittled a field of eight or so contenders down to two finalists.

Boris Johnson, as noted in the headline above, would love to be more like Donald Trump. His shit-stirring suggestion that he may try to stage a comeback, before he's actually left, may be the most overtly Trumpy thing he's ever done. (He remains prime minister for the moment, and apparently will not resign until the new party leader takes over in early September.) But for better or worse, both British politics and British culture including the enduring cultural politics of the supposedly-abolished class system sharply limit the possibilities of balls-to-the-wall Trumpiness.

Johnson would love to have a Trump-scale cult of personality behind him backing everything he does but a week's worth of clip-job articles in the right-wing press won't get that done. He'd love to be able to terrorize leading figures in his own party into silent acquiescence with the threat of political doom, even though they not-so-secretly hate his guts but in fact his collapse came because dozens of prominent Tories decided he was a political liability and flung him to the curb. As noted above, Johnson's final address to Commons was not full of blatant or outrageous lies and in fact the numerous falsehoods that got him into trouble as PM have been of the penny-ante, prevaricating variety, and would barely even register on the Trump scale.

Johnson's speech clearly implied that his fellow Conservatives had made a dreadful mistake in driving him from power, and the mini-bubble of "comeback" stories are no doubt meant as a trial balloon toward undoing that decision. To the extent that the left-behind Johnson supporters offer any sort of coherent narrative, it goes like this:

In the leadership election that's about to happen, his fans throw themselves behind Foreign Minister Liz Truss, a political chameleon and more or less a Johnson loyalist, over former Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, who despite his South Asian background is pretty much a dyed-in-the-wool tax-cutting conservative with a Stanford MBA and a Goldman Sachs pedigree. In a year or so, Truss bows out or flames out or loses an election, and the chastened Tories, yielding to the public outcry for more Boris, return to the embrace of their dishonorable schoolboy.

Johnson can't claim that his political downfall was fake news and didn't really happen. And he doesn't need to claim that he fell victim to a conspiracy of backstabbers, since everyone knows that's what happened.

There are about 11 reasons why that won't happen, starting with the fact that there will be a British general election in 2024 (if not earlier), and almost no one believes that a party led by Boris Johnson could conceivably win it. But even the fact that such a scenario lingers somewhere on the outer margins of plausibility, and that Johnson and his supporters dare to dream of short-circuiting the established political process by way of a popular uprising, speaks to the global legacy of Donald John Trump.

But Boris Johnson isn't Donald Trump, and really can't be and this is a moment where the general historical parallels between postwar British and American politics begin to break down. For all his mendacity, vulgarity and hunger for power, Johnson is a consummate insider, an upper-class populist of a sort stereotypically familiar to the British public. After he leaves office, he'll be back at the bar at whichever exclusive London club he belongs to, cheerfully drinking excellent sherry with former allies and former foes and well positioned to make major bank in the private sector.

Johnson cannot claim that his political downfall is fake news and didn't really happen, only that it was a bad idea. He doesn't need to claim that he was the victim of a conspiracy of backstabbing traitors, since that's how the system works, and everyone understands that's exactly what happened.

I'm not here, trust me, to deliver some anguished Anglophile cri de coeur about how at least the guardrails of democracy held up in Blighty and in the end the Conservatives showed they had some principles and, gosh, maybe we'd be better off with a parliamentary system. That's not even remotely what happened: The Tories stood with Boris Johnson, giving him everything he wanted and ignoring his lies and ethical failings, right up to the moment they decided he was a loser.

If Boris and his dead-end allies dream of terraforming an American-style system, in which a political party can be swamped by mob sentiment, a whole lot of prominent Republicans in the U.S. would love to import the British system, in which a party leader who's gone sour and who won't shut up about how he didn't really lose the last election, just for instance can be junked without risking a massive primary rebellion.

I'm not sure that I would trade the American political system, compromised and paralytic as it currently is, for a constitutional monarchy with, um, no actual constitution and a distant-cousin relationship to actual democracy. But that's not the point, and neither of our nations is in a position to point fingers at the other one just at present.

There is, in the end, a continuing if approximate kinship: Boris Johnson's downfall represents roughly the same kind of conditional victory for democracy as Donald Trump's electoral defeat. Both men yearn for doubtful comebacks that remain, for the moment, out of reach but the larger question of whether the tendency toward autocracy that both men represent can be defeated will not be answered anytime soon.

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Boris Johnson only wishes he were Donald Trump: But his comeback dreams won't come true - Salon

Former Trump White House aide Steve Bannon was found guilty Friday of two counts of contempt of Congress after a trial in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Jurors deliberated for less than three hours before convicting Bannon of willfully failing to comply with subpoenas demanding his testimony and records, which were issued last September by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President Donald Trump.

He faces a minimum punishment of 30 days in jail and a maximum of one year when he is sentenced on Oct. 21. He also faces a fine in the range of $100 to a maximum of $100,000.

"The subpoena to Stephen Bannon was not an invitation that could be rejected or ignored," said Matthew Graves, the United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.

"Mr. Bannon had an obligation to appear before the House Select Committee to give testimony and provide documents. His refusal to do so was deliberate, and now a jury has found that he must pay the consequences."

Former U.S. President Donald Trump's White House chief strategist Steve Bannon arrives following his trial on contempt of Congress charges for his refusal to cooperate with the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, at U.S. District Court in Washington, U.S., July 22, 2022.

Evelyn Hockstein | Reuters

"We respect their decision," Bannon, 68, said outside of the E. Barrett Prettyman Courthouse, referring to the jurors at his trial.

"We may have lost a battle here today, but we're not going to lose this war," Bannon said. "I stand with Trump and the Constitution, and I will never back off that, ever."

Bannon plans to appeal his conviction, which came a day after the Jan. 6 committee held a public hearing that featured evidence that included his own words.

The committee played an audio clip of Bannon, speaking to a group of people on Oct. 31, 2020, days before the presidential election, in which he said that Trump would claim to have won the White House race regardless of the actual results.

"What Trump's gonna do is just declare victory. Right? He's gonna declare victory. But that doesn't mean he's a winner," Bannon said. "He's just gonna say he's a winner.

That is exactly what Trump did for weeks after losing both the popular election vote and the Electoral College vote to President Joe Biden.

On Jan. 5, 2021, the eve of Congress holding a joint session to confirm Biden's Electoral College victory, Bannon spoke to Trump on the phone for 11 minutes, and then went on a radio show where he made a dark prediction.

"All hell is going to break loose tomorrow," Bannon said on that show. "It's all converging, and now we're on, as they say, the point of attack."

"I'll tell you this: It's not going to happen like you think it's going to happen," he said. "It's going to be quite extraordinarily different, and all I can say is strap in."

The next day, thousands of Trump supporters who believed he had won the election besieged the Capitol, with hundreds of them swarming through the halls of Congress, disrupting for hours the session confirming the official results.

The leaders of the Jan. 6 committee lauded the jury's decision Friday.

"The conviction of Steve Bannon is a victory for the rule of law and an important affirmation of the Select Committee's work," Rep. Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is chair of the Jan. 6 committee, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said in a joint statement Friday afternoon.

"As the prosecutor stated, Steve Bannon 'chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law.' Just as there must be accountability for all those responsible for the events of January 6th, anyone who obstructs our investigation into these matters should face consequences. No one is above the law," Thompson and Cheney said.

Bannon had served as chief strategist and counselor to Trump for about a half-year before being ousted in mid-2017. Since then, however, he has been an ardent backer of the ex-president and the so-called MAGA "Make America Great Again" movement.

Two weeks after the Capitol riot, on his last night as president, Trump issued dozens of pardons, including one to Bannon, who had been criminally charged in federal court in New York with swindling donors in a purported effort to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico.

Prosecutors in that case said Bannon received $1 million in funds from the We Build the Wall group, and diverted that money to a separate nonprofit he had already created, whose ostensible purpose was "promoting economic nationalism and American sovereignty."

In her closing arguments Friday morning at Bannon's contempt trial, assistant U.S. Attorney Molly Gaston told jurors he "chose allegiance to Donald Trump over compliance with the law" by refusing to appear for testimony and give documents to the Jan. 6 committee.

"When it really comes down to it, he did not want to recognize Congress' authority or play by the government's rules," Gaston said. "Our government only works if people show up. It only works if people play by the rules. And it only works if people are held accountable when they do not."

Bannon's lawyers did not present a defense during the trial, which began Monday with jury selection.

His attorneys were hamstrung by pretrial rulings by the judge in the case, who severely limited the evidence they could present at trial.

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During his own closing arguments Friday, Bannon's lawyer Evan Corcoran tried to suggest that Thompson did not sign a subpoena for Bannon, NBC reported. Corcoran dropped that line of argument after the prosecution objected.

Corcoran also asked jurors to set aside memories of Jan. 6 in their deliberations.

"None of us will soon forget January 6, 2021," Corcoran said. "It's part of our collective memory. But there's no evidence in this case that Steve Bannon was involved at all. For purposes of this case we have to put out of our thoughts January 6."

Jurors began their deliberations just before 11:40 a.m. ET, after closing arguments concluded. The verdicts were read out in court at around 2:50 p.m. ET.

Another former Trump aide, the trade advisor Peter Navarro, was arrested in early June on charges identical to the ones that Bannon was convicted of.

Navarro failed to appear to testify on March 2 in response to the subpoena from the House panel and also failed to produce by Feb. 23 the documents sought by that same subpoena, according to the indictment issued by a grand jury in Washington federal court.

CNBC's Kevin Breuninger contributed to this report.

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Former Trump aide Steve Bannon guilty in Jan. 6 contempt of Congress case - CNBC

michael schmidt

They usually dont let me do this, so this is like a were good? OK.

Its weird to hear my own voice through my

Youve got a bit of a radio voice.

[LAUGHS]: I do not think thats right.

All right. Before we start tell us who you are. Like, who are you, why what have you done in your career.

Well, early in my career I was a writer for Time magazine. I decided to become a lawyer. And early in that career I was a federal prosecutor in Manhattan. I focused on public corruption cases. I became the chief of the public corruption unit at a time when we brought successful cases against several major New York political figures. But then I was asked to join the Mueller investigation, and I moved to Washington and worked on that for two years. And now Im the head of the White Collar Practice at the law firm Cooley.

Youre not someone that I know that well. I mean, during the Mueller investigation I showed up at your house to try and get you to talk. And I went to your door and, your doorbell was broken, and we knocked on the door and I could hear you and your family inside. And I was with a colleague of mine, and I turned to the colleague, and I said, you know what, this is too invasive, weve gone too far, this man is inside with his family. And we left.

I didnt know that. Thats all a little creepy [LAUGHS]:.

Thats fair, totally fair.

But you concentrated in the Mueller investigation on a narrow question an important question, but a narrow question of whether Trump had tried to impede that investigation, right?

Thats right.

And what did you find?

As we noted in our report, we found that the presidents conduct during the course of the investigation involved a series of actions that involved attacking the investigation, publicly and privately, trying to control the investigation from his position as President and within the White House. There were efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation. And so those were our predominant findings in terms of obstruction.

And despite finding all of these things that, at the very least was not great behavior, you made a decision about what to do about whether Trump broke the law. What was that decision?

Well, ultimately we decided not to do what traditional prosecutors do when theyre considering bringing a criminal charge. We went down that road for a few different reasons. It was based on our understanding of the role of the president and our understanding of what we believe to be the proper role of a prosecutor.

So you guys basically made a decision not to make a decision, to sort of let the facts speak for themselves and say, look, if after this man, Donald Trump, leaves office and the Justice Department wants to prosecute him, they can do that based on what we found. But were not going to make a decision. Were not going to say whether we think he broke the law.

Thats basically right. And the reason for that is that normally the first step that a prosecutor takes when deciding to bring a criminal charge against somebody is to determine for yourself whether that person is, in fact, guilty. And then you weigh the admissible evidence, you see can you actually prove this case in court, will it stand up on appeal. But here we werent dealing with an ordinary subject. The President is the head of the executive branch. Under Department of Justice policy the President cannot be charged with a crime while in office. And that is because simply charging him with a crime, just making the accusation, that would infringe on his ability to be President.

Right. So that leads us to the January 6 hearings and a different set of circumstances because, of course, Trump is no longer President. Explain to me what crimes Donald Trump could be investigated for based on everything weve learned from the January 6 hearings.

I think the three main potential crimes that people have talked about and that would be at issue here are, number one, obstruction of an official proceeding, number two, conspiracy to defraud the United States, and number three, depending on the evidence, seditious conspiracy.

Lets start with seditious conspiracy. What does that mean and how hard is that to prove?

It means agreeing with one or more other people to use force or violence to prevent the law from being carried out. Some of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 have been charged with this and its for their efforts and their plans to stop the counting of the electoral vote by force.

So basically using violence to stop the certification of the election.

Exactly.

So for someone like Trump to be charged with that would that mean that the government would have to prove that he conspired with those individuals to use violence? Would you have to show that he told them to commit violence? Would you have to show that he actually committed violence himself?

You would not have to show that he committed violence himself. Youd have to show that he agreed with people who were going to use violence or who were planning to use violence to stop the electoral vote count from happening.

So you basically need, like, Donald Trump sitting down with the Oath Keepers and with, like, a map of the Capitol and saying, look, like, this is how you guys should break into the building to stop Pence from doing his certification.

I dont think you need that much, but you need to be able to prove that the President had an agreement or that he joined a conspiracy to not just have the vote count be stopped but to use force or violence to stop it. And the evidence thats out on the public record right now I dont think would support that.

OK, so what about the charge of defrauding the public, defrauding the American people? It seems like just from watching it that there might be a lot of grist for a charge there. Im thinking of Trumps efforts to install loyalists at the Justice Department, him pressuring the Secretary of State of Georgia to come up with the exact number of votes that he needed to win that state. It certainly looks to many like he took these acts knowing that he lost the election but was still trying to overturn them anyway. Are those examples of actions that could be used to show that he was defrauding the American people?

Look, there is a crime called conspiracy to defraud the United States, and it effectively means conspiring or agreeing with other people where the intent is to stop or obstruct the lawful function of the government using deceitful or dishonest means.

The difficulty with that kind of a charge here is that its a little novel. Conspiracy to defraud is something thats not itself novel, but applying it to this set of facts as Ive seen it is something that has not clearly been done before.

Well, then lets get to that third charge the charge of obstructing an act of Congress. Define that for us.

The proceeding itself would be the proceeding on January 6 where Congress and the Vice President were going to certify the results of the 2020 election. And the crime would be doing something or conspiring with others to do something to obstruct that proceeding and to do it corruptly.

How would you prove that someone obstructed an act of Congress or a congressional proceeding?

At the most basic level, you need two things. You need some action that would impede or would tend to impede the proceeding itself, and then you need corrupt intent. Intent is typically the hardest thing to show in a political corruption or an obstruction investigation. It requires showing that somebody was acting with an improper motive, that he was effectively conscious of wrongdoing at the time he took his action. And here theres been a lot of evidence about the Presidents advisors and lawyers and people from the Department of Justice telling the President that the election was over, that there wasnt sufficient evidence of fraud to overturn the results of the election. And so thats the kind of evidence that would get at the Presidents intent as hes continuing to push these claims of fraud even after having been told all of that.

Theres evidence that he was told that Mike Pence did not have the power to, on his own, refuse to take part in the certification or to delay the certification of the votes and that he continued to push Pence to do that. And then theres the evidence of his conduct on January 6 itself and some of the things he did not do while it was clear that the Capitol had been effectively under siege, and people were telling him to take actions, and he didnt. All of those are things that would go to helping establish the Presidents intent.

OK, so theres some evidence that could help establish intent here. But as you said, as a prosecutor, you would want to establish intent and action. What would be, putting the facts aside, which were not supposed to do in journalism, what would a clear cut example be of an action? If I said, make up an action that shows obstructing a congressional proceeding, what would that look like?

I think like, if, for example, if there is evidence that the President directed Mike Pences security detail to not let Pence go to the Capitol or, when he was there, to actually direct them to get him out of there before he could certify the vote that would be an act. It would absolutely have the effect of impairing or impeding the proceeding. And I think, if that was what happened, I think it wouldnt be that hard to show that the intent was corrupt.

So you need a clear-cut example of Trump doing something that literally impedes this certification.

Not necessarily in that you could have an attempt or you could have a conspiracy. But in the end I think a prosecutor would still need to point to an act, an action that the president either took himself or directed to have been taken that would itself obstruct the proceeding.

Based on what we know, Trump tried to pressure Pence in the days leading up to January 6 to essentially take the certification into his own hands and either decide who won or send the votes back to the states. You have Trumps actions on the Ellipse where he gives a speech, and he says, lets all march to the Capitol. And then he tries to go there himself in his own motorcade. And then when the riot is going on, Trump tweets about Pence, criticizing Pence for how Pence did. Unpack those different acts and explain to us why those different acts would potentially get you there or not get you there in terms of establishing that Trump did something to truly impede the proceeding.

I think for each of those acts there are ways to look at them where they would, in fact, have had the tendency to obstruct the proceeding, but they all have their own problems. For example, if the jawboning of Pence is basically a disagreement, and hes not trying to actually stop the proceeding, hes trying to get the proceeding to come out in a way thats in his favor, or hope that by going up there and then it getting delayed, it could buy him some time, thats different than an action that could actually obstruct the proceeding.

And the other things that you mentioned and that are out there, the speech that the president gave on the Ellipse early that afternoon telling the Secret Service to take away the magnetometers, the tweet about the Vice President when people were already inside the Capitol, these are things where, on the one hand, you can make an argument that they were designed to try to rile people up to then be able to go to the Capitol and to obstruct the proceeding. But theyre also things that politicians generally do. And theres a defense that this is political speech, that the tweet would be political speech. That the only reason he would have said to not let the magnetometers stay up would be because he wanted to pack the crowd and nothing to do with trying to get people who were armed to then go to the Capitol.

So what youre saying is that because these actions that he took are sort of braided together with his First Amendment rights it makes it more difficult for those to be actual acts because its unclear where his free speech rights begin or end, and his intent to obstruct the proceeding picks up from there. Is that right?

I think when it comes in particular to the speech itself and to the tweet or other tweets that those, he would have a legal argument that its core protected First Amendment activity. Hes the President. He needs to be able to talk to supporters. He didnt explicitly say, lets go march on the Capitol, and break the doors down, and stop this proceeding from happening. And so theres a real legal defense there. And factually theres the defense that he did not in fact say the magic words that would be true incitement. At least he would have an argument that thats not what he was actually doing.

So if Im reading between the lines on what youre saying, it seems like, in terms of these two things you need, intent and an act, based on what we know and has come out at the hearings, theres probably enough on the intent side. But on the act side, its fuzzier in terms of whether theres a clear-cut act. Is that I mean, if were sitting back, and were assessing this, and youre saying, OK just do it for us, right? So like, youre the prosecutor. How much you know, do you get there on each one?

Number one, I dont really want to weigh in on the strength of the evidence, in part because I dont know all of it. And it would be a little bit of shooting from the sidelines to weigh in. But number two, I do think its important as the evidence is coming out of the January 6 Committee to realize that there are difficulties here in proving either of these things. There are issues with, are any of the things that the President did or try to get others to do that day, would they really count as obstructive acts? And in terms of his intent, theres definitely been a lot of evidence that has come out. Does that get you over the hump of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the President was acting with a corrupt intent? I think these are very hard questions.

Beyond the obvious of, like, wanting to have witnesses in the room for everything and documents backing it all up, if you were the prosecutor here, what would you want to know? What would you really be keying in on to try and understand whether the President broke the law?

One thing that I think I would want to know if is there any evidence that the President was telling people internally, anybody internally, that he didnt believe the things he was saying. That he knew he had lost and that all of this was effectively a construct to try to stay in power. If the Department had evidence of him saying that to a confidant or to somebody who was in the inner circle, thats the kind of evidence that I think, if I were a prosecutor in this type of a case, I would really want.

And why does that change things?

I think it goes right at the heart of intent, and it would put a very strong gloss on all of the actions that have already come out through this January 6 Committee process.

So youre saying by strengthening intent it sort of helps to bolster the acts because their intentions of the actual acts are clear.

Because I think what it could end up showing is that some of the actions might be able to be read in different ways.

If the government could actually show that the reason behind them, the intent behind them was all about trying to stop the certification of the election, that would then change what might be the type of act that could be read in two different directions and read in a way where, actually, thats the kind of action where the purpose of it was to impede the certification of the election.

So bolstering one can help bolster the other.

It can.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

After our last hearing, President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings. That person declined to answer or respond to President Trumps call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us, and this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice. Let me say one more time, we will take any effort to influence witness testimony very seriously.

Weve heard Liz Cheney talk about witness tampering. Would a witness tampering charge here be more appealing to a prosecutor?

Potentially because its more straightforward than some of the other things that are out there. Its easier for the public to digest, and the law on witness tampering is very clear. Youre not going to be pushing for some aggressive view of the law. Look, I do think factually tying the former President to the type of witness tampering that came up in that congressional hearing, I think, would be a challenge.

But if that were the provable crime, that in some ways becomes easier to explain that no person can tamper with the witness as theyre going and provide testimony before Congress on an important issue.

So its cleaner and clearer.

If the facts support it, I think it would be both cleaner and clearer.

OK, so lets say if prosecutors think they can prove intent, they think they have an act, an action, and they think they can prove the count beyond a reasonable doubt, and they can survive an appeal, and they send that up the chain of command at the Justice Department, it lands on Merrick Garlands desk in Washington, and he says, OK, I accept at face value what you prosecutors have determined about intent and action, then Merrick Garland has another decision to make. A whole other set of issues to look at. What are those issues and what is that decision?

In this kind of a situation its not easy. As I said earlier, when a prosecutor makes an analysis about whether to bring a criminal charge in any case, they have to believe that the person is guilty, they have to have the evidence to prove it, and to have it withstand any challenge on appeal, but then they also have to believe that its in the publics interest to bring the case. Is there a substantial federal interest in bringing this prosecution?

Explain what that means. What does the publics interest mean to a prosecutor?

Look, in some respects its a very straightforward thing that prosecutors consider all the time. Most prosecutors believe that their job is to do justice. And so, of course, what they want to do if theyre going to charge somebody with a crime is not just do an analysis of the facts and the law but also think about and believe that this is the right thing for the country. And theyre factors that are actually listed in whats called the Justice Manual, which is the guidebook for all federal prosecutors that walk through all of the different factors that our prosecutors should consider when evaluating the public interest in bringing a prosecution. And they include things like the seriousness of the offense, the circumstances of the defendant, the ability for there to be other means of accountability, the need for deterrence in that particular situation. And the hard question is, how do you weigh all these things? And theres not an easy answer to that. It comes down to an assessment of what you think is right and what you think is ultimately in the interests of the American public.

So what youre saying is that in our system weve entrusted prosecutors with not just the ability to investigate crimes and figure out whether an individual violated the law in terms of whether the facts line up with the law, but then on top of that, whether bringing such a prosecution is essentially the right thing to do. This power that weve given prosecutors in our country is just so great that theres an added element of whether is this in the best interest of the public that every case is looked at through.

Thats right.

And why is it the prosecutors job to figure out whether its in the best interests of the country and not simply just based on the evidence? Why do they get to decide whether its in the interest of the country or not?

In the criminal law, you want prosecutors to have some measure of discretion. You want to have a prosecutor have the ability to say no, to say, you know what, theres a different forum to try to carry out the best interests of the public here. And I think all this really means is that when you apply that to a president or a former president and somebody who is a potential candidate in a presidential election potentially representing the whole country that you do want a prosecutor to consider the public interest there. Otherwise, you could effectively have your head sort of in the sand and be bull charging ahead, taking a step that could have massive ramifications for the whole country.

Why should that matter? Right, so one of the major tenets of the American legal system is that were all treated the same under the law. Why is it that it seems like the bar for someone whos such a high profile politician or a former president or someone running is higher? Why is that higher? Why is that not the same for everyone else?

I dont think its necessarily higher, but the considerations when youre talking about a political leader are certainly different and harder because there you have the very clear and important rule that the Department of Justice should try in every way possible not to interfere with elections, to not take steps using the criminal process that could end up affecting the political process. And so I think a prosecutor in evaluating what to do with potential criminal conduct by a political leader has to weigh those things. And those are things that are just not going to be present in the ordinary course.

Does it become so high profile at a point that not prosecuting is as much a political decision as prosecuting?

It certainly could be viewed that way. And one of the things that the Department of Justice has to weigh in this kind of a situation is both what are the potential ramifications of prosecuting, but also the ramifications of not prosecuting. And here, in part because of just how high profile all of this is, if there were very clear evidence of a crime and it was sort of very straightforward and provable, but the Department of Justice walked away, there is a real risk of the American people thinking that there are two systems of justice. And that would be devastating to the mission of the Department.

And in this case, in terms of assessing whether to bring a charge, is the fact that it occurred around the certification of the election, something that we are supposed to hold so sacred in this country and our democracy, does that weigh in terms of look, this is a really serious event, and because a really serious event led to complete mayhem on essentially one entire branch of government that a charge should be brought? Or, I mean

I think that shows exactly why it is so important to get this right. And Merrick Garland has said publicly that hes effectively committing all of the resources necessary to get to the bottom of what happened and to hold people accountable for it. I think we should take him at his word. But without question, what happened on January 6 was horrendous for our country and for our democracy. You certainly wouldnt want to look away if theres criminal wrongdoing there. But you also want to make sure that the cases that you bring are strong and are the right cases to bring.

But like, also the issue is, look, if we go to trial and we lose, the consequences of that could be just as great for the country, right?

That is right. And that is one of the reasons why, before bringing criminal charges at this level as part of this investigation, the Department of Justice is going to want to make sure that their cases are as bulletproof as humanly possible. One possibility to consider would be whether it would make sense to delay bringing a charge until after the 2024 election. The upside of that is that you potentially are not interfering in the actual electoral process and having a potential trial or pretrial motions right in the middle of an election. The downside is that you would still have all kinds of talk and chatter about the presidential candidate being under investigation. And if he wins, then you have an even more difficult decision. Do you then bring a charge after the election is over against a candidate who won?

So if we look at the whole landscape of this thing, in your analysis, it seems like to me that bringing a prosecution against Donald Trump would be difficult. It was difficult when he was in office because he was President. Its now difficult because hes out of office and may run for president. Maybe you have to delay this prosecution until after the 2024 election. If its so hard to prosecute a president or a former president or such a high profile politician like this, why would we even investigate it anyway?

I think if theres evidence of criminal wrongdoing and its a federal criminal wrongdoing, it is the job of the Department of Justice to investigate that. And in the end an investigation such as the one being done by the January 6 Committee or an investigation like what we did under Special Counsel Mueller there are forms of accountability that are vindicated even if criminal charges are not brought. One of the great things that the January 6 Committee has been able to do has been to show in much greater detail what was actually happening on January 6, not just inside Congress and among the people who stormed the Capitol, but also inside the White House at that time. And I think all of the American public are better for having seen these facts and knowing what is out there.

If ultimately that doesnt result in a criminal prosecution of the President or any of his top advisors, that doesnt mean that there hasnt been some real good that has come out of the January 6 Committee.

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Andrew, thank you so much for coming in to talk to us today.

It was a pleasure to be here.

Look, no person is above the law in this country. Nothing stops us.

Even a former President?

No I dont know how to maybe Ill say that again. No person is above the law in this country. I cant say it any more clearly than that. There is nothing in the principles of prosecution in any other factors which prevent us from investigating anyone, anyone who is criminally responsible for an attempt to undo a democratic election.

The January 6 committees next hearing is scheduled for 8:00 PM tonight.

Well be right back.

Heres what else you need to know today. A bipartisan group of senators has reached a deal to modernize the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that President Trump sought to abuse on January 6 to remain in office. Their proposed legislation seeks to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next by, among other things, clarifying that the vice presidents role in certifying electoral votes on January 6 is purely ceremonial.

And on Wednesday Russia expanded its territorial ambitions in Ukraine saying that it wants to recapture land in the countrys south. Thats a reversal from a few months ago when Russia said it would only seek to capture territory in Ukraines east. But so far its unclear if Russia can follow through with the threat.

Todays episode was produced by Jessica Cheung and Asthaa Chaturvedi with help from Stella Tan. It was edited by Michael Benoist, Lisa Chow, and Paige Cowett, contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

Thats it for The Daily. Im Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Original post:

The Case Against Donald Trump - The New York Times