Sand pounding will happen soon for the GOP as their brand of crazy may finally unwind. Slowly the Big Lie will unspool, inch-by-inch over the eight or more hearings, despite some attempt to frame legislation that might reform the Electoral College processes. There will be revelations and perhaps surprises. Previous guy is definitely shaken and more than stirred by the plethora of facts, so much so that he might even declare his 2024 run on 4 July to fundraise against the attention created by the Select Committee.
The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack will unveil new evidence at Watergate-style public hearings next week showing Donald Trump and top aides acted with corrupt intent to stop Joe Biden’s certification, according to sources close to the inquiry.
The panel intends to use the hearings as its principal method of revealing potential crimes by Trump as he sought to overturn the 2020 election results, the sources said, in what could be a treacherous legal and political moment for the former president.
As the justice department mounts parallel investigations into the Capitol attack, the select committee is hoping that the previously unseen evidence will leave an indelible mark on the American public about the extent to which Trump went in trying to return himself to the Oval Office.
“They’re important for setting a record for posterity, but they’re also important for jolting the American public into realizing what a direct threat we had coming from the highest levels of government to illegitimately install a president who lost,” Norman Ornstein, a political scientist and emeritus scholar at the conservative thinktank the American Enterprise Institute, said of the hearings.
The panel’s ambitions for the hearings are twofold, the sources said: presenting the basis for alleging Trump broke the law and placing the Capitol attack in a broader context of efforts to overturn the election, with the ex-president’s involvement as the central thread.
At their heart, the hearings are about distilling thousands of communications between top Trump White House aides and operatives outside the administration and the Trump campaign into a compelling narrative of events about the events of 6 January, the sources said.
In order to tell that story, the sources said, the select committee intends to have its senior investigative counsels reveal previously secret White House records, photos and videos that will be presented, in real time, to starkly illustrate the live witness testimony.
On Thursday night, at the inaugural hearing at 8pm, the panel’s chairman Bennie Thompson and the vice chair Liz Cheney are likely to make opening arguments, outline a roadmap for the hearings, and give an overview of the events of 6 January, and the preceding weeks.
The panel is likely to focus on broad themes for the following four hearings, such as how Trump used false claims of voter fraud to undermine the 2020 election and future races, and how he tried to use fake electors to deceive Congress into returning him to office.
House investigators are also likely to focus on how Trump directly pivoted to the 6 January congressional certification – and not the December deadlines for states to certify their electors – as an inflection point, and how his actions led straight to militia and far-right groups’ covert maneuverings.
www.theguardian.com/...
The House's Jan. 6 committee has split behind the scenes over what actions to take after the public hearings: Some members want big changes on voting rights — and even to abolish the Electoral College — while others are resisting proposals to overhaul the U.S. election system, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: Televised hearings begin Thursday night. Committee members are in lockstep about capturing Americans' attention by unfurling a mountain of evidence connecting former President Trump and those close to him with the attack on the Capitol.
- But the committee's legacy depends in large part on what reforms it pursues after those hearings to prevent another Jan. 6 from happening — and that's where the united front breaks down.
The big picture: Disagreements arise whenever proposals are raised such as abolishing the Electoral College, vastly expanding voting rights like same-day registration or tightening the Insurrection Act to make it harder for a president to deploy the military domestically for use on civilians.
Behind the scenes: Nobody on the House select committee is more committed than Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to pursuing Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol. But she flatly opposes some of the more sweeping election law reforms backed by several committee Democrats.
- The broadest differences are between Cheney and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), according to three sources familiar with the committee's private discussions. The two have a warm personal relationship but fundamentally disagree on what needs to be done to reform America's election laws.
- Raskin, a former constitutional law scholar, is by far the committee's most outspoken member during its private discussions about voting rights.
- "Liz is much more conservative, as far as what kinds of changes she wants to see done," said a source with direct knowledge of their conversations.
Between the lines: Committee members know it's going to be extremely hard to get unanimous agreement on the legislative recommendations in their final report. So they've deferred those decisions.
- They've focused instead on completing the investigation and preparing for the public hearings beginning Thursday at 8pm ET.
- A source with direct knowledge said the committee is "trying to preserve the unanimity that we've had to date, so that we can go into the hearings and just get through the hearings, and then tackle the hard stuff on the other side."
- "We do recognize that there are significant differences [in legislative recommendations] that we're going to have to work through because everybody has to sign the final report," the source added.
In multiple conversations among committee members, Raskin has argued that the Electoral College should be abolished — that if presidents were elected by a popular vote, this would protect future presidential elections against the subversion that Trump and his allies tried to pull off in 2020.
- Trump and some of his lawyers, including Rudy Giuliani, pressured Republican lawmakers in closely contested states to send alternate slates of electors to Washington, in their failed effort to overturn Joe Biden's victory.
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The bottom line: The longer the Jan. 6 committee postpones making legislative recommendations, the less likely those recommendations are to pass.
- There's a finite number of days on the Senate calendar, and if Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) becomes speaker next year, he's not going to do anything this committee recommends.
www.axios.com/...