Susan B Glasser/New Yorker:
Dishonor, Trump’s and His Party’s, Is the Real January 6th Takeaway
Liz Cheney, defying the G.O.P., offered a searing indictment of the former President at Thursday’s hearing.
At the end of her presentation, Cheney showed what might have been the night’s most revealing witness statement—a short clip of Jared Kushner. In it, Kushner was asked about the repeated threats to resign made by Trump’s White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, and his staff, as they sought to stop Trump from unconstitutionally seeking to overturn the election. Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who served as one of the former President’s close advisers throughout his four disruptive years in the White House, said that he did not take Cipollone’s threats to resign seriously. He thought that Cipollone was just “whining.”
It was a brutal moment. Kushner did not believe Trump’s false claims about the election. But he, like so many others surrounding Trump, like so many of Cheney’s Republican colleagues on Capitol Hill, who knew full well that everything Trump said about the election was a lie, chose to wash his hands of the matter. Instead of trying to stop the President, he and Ivanka purchased a 32.2-million-dollar lot on an exclusive private island near Miami, in December, 2020, and he started writing his memoir. Whining, indeed.
AP:
Jan. 6 panelists: Enough evidence uncovered to indict Trump
Members of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Sunday they have uncovered enough evidence for the Justice Department to consider an unprecedented criminal indictment against former President Donald Trump for seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The committee announced that Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, is among the witnesses scheduled to testify at a hearing Monday that focuses on Trump’s effort to spread his lies about a stolen election. Stepien was subpoenaed for his public testimony.
10 GOP Senators back gun safety deal, making this officially a bipartisan BFD.
Biden endorses it.
Cynics are ruminating over how to complain about it. Meanwhile, looks like it will happen with or without them. Next steps are writing the bill and holding Rs to their part of the deal.
ICYMI, from CBS:
31 Patriot Front members arrested near pride event in Idaho
Police arrested 31 men found inside a U-Haul truck near a pride event in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, on Saturday. Police said they believe the men were affiliated with a white supremacist group and were intending to riot.
"It is clear to us, based on the gear the individuals had with them ... along with paperwork that we seized from them, that they came to riot downtown," Coeur d'Alene Police Chief Lee White said Saturday at a press conference.
According to White, police were alerted about the U-Haul around 1:38 p.m. by a concerned citizen who said they saw members of the group getting into the back of the truck. The group was confronted by police about 10 minutes later, White said.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Why Liz Cheney’s ‘seditious conspiracy’ talk is awful for Trump
Not long into the riveting first hearing of the Jan. 6 House select committee, Rep. Liz Cheney dropped a bombshell. In coming hearings, the Wyoming Republican said, the committee will detail “plots to commit seditious conspiracy on January 6th.”
In saying this as committee vice chair, Cheney didn’t merely offer a preview of what’s to come in the hearings. She also suggested the hearings could have a longer-term effect: Priming and informing the American people in advance, should criminal charges be brought against Donald Trump, or any of his high level co-conspirators, or both.
Whether charges relating to Jan. 6 will result is unknown, and a congressional committee doesn’t make that decision. But the committee can urge the Justice Department to bring charges. And even if it doesn’t, Cheney’s language suggests the hearings will produce explosive evidence of striking coordination involving Trump, his highest-level allies and the violence on the ground.
Jeff Nussbaum/Politico Magazine:
The Warning About Trump That JFK Never Got to Deliver
In his undelivered final speech, Kennedy warned the world against ‘voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality.’
In Dallas he was prepared to decry, “voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,” which he feared could, “handicap this country’s security.”
He planned to say that “We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will ‘talk sense to the American people.’ But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.”
It was to have been a bold statement and a sharp warning, one that might have altered to contours of our national response to today’s violent, disassociated rhetoric — had he lived to deliver it.
EJ Dionne/WaPo:
Cheney leaves Trump and his GOP apologists reeling
Constitutional democracies are rarely destroyed by a single blow. Their citizens often sleepwalk into catastrophe, discovering too late that a degree of timely vigilance could have preserved their system of self-rule.
This is why the work of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection is so important. Its public hearing Thursday was a red alert.
Using less than two hours of prime-time television, the committee issued an urgent plea: Americans must understand the violence they saw on that winter day in 2021 as nothing less than what Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the committee chair, called “an attempted coup.”
Attempted coups have authors, and with a steely, matter-of-fact eloquence worthy of history’s most able prosecutors, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the vice chair, indicted Donald Trump in every sense but the formal one.
WaPo:
How the Jan. 6 hearing played out on the pro-Trump web
Ironically, online accounts that helped organize the insurrection tried to debunk the evidence the Jan. 6 committee presented Thursday
The outpouring of Trump support came in response to a hearing that brought together new testimony with previously unreleased footage to document both the gravity of the attack on the Capitol and Trump’s role in spurring it. It also underscored how the social media landscape has shifted in the 17 months since Trump was suspended by the leading online platforms for his role in fanning the violent attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s election as president.
For the most part, Trump and some of his most ardent backers were relegated to smaller platforms as they sought to respond.
Philip Bump/WaPo:
Fox News didn’t just ignore the Jan. 6 hearing. It did something worse.
When 8 p.m. Eastern rolled around, though, it became clear that the network wasn’t simply going to not cover the hearing. Instead, it began more than two hours of commercial-free rebuttal. It didn’t simply cover other things, it focused almost entirely on the hearing as though it was former president Donald Trump’s defense team — without, of course, showing its audience the prosecution’s case.
WaPo:
Judge: Jan. 6 hearings may help defendants shift accountability to Trump
House probe pinning blame on former president comes as Proud Boys, other riot defendants decry biasing pretrial publicity
“Why isn’t that theme actually helpful to this defendant, making him seem like a small cog in bigger political machinations happening behind the scenes?” Howell told an attorney for Anthony Robert Williams, of the Detroit area, who faces trial June 27.
Benton C. Martin, Williams’s assistant federal defender, argued that the House hearings raised “the decibel level of media coverage” and cited the “very real difference in the number of people [in Washington] who will watch knowing this was in their backyard, versus in Michigan.”
…
On Friday, Howell joined all judges who have ruled so far in dismissing a request to move Williams’s trial, saying careful juror vetting can weed out bias, as seen by an initial handful of trials held to date in Jan. 6 cases.
Howell said it is “offensive” to suggest that Democratic jurors will be less fair than Republican ones, that people in Williams’s native eastern Michigan are “less sophisticated” or pay less attention to the news than those in D.C., or that jurors will be unable to focus on individuals’ conduct, instead of their political beliefs.