Marcy Wheeler/emptywheel:
FINALLY, EVERYONE IS TALKING ABOUT TRUMP’S OBSTRUCTION ON JANUARY 6
Twice in the last 24 hours, Liz Cheney has read from texts that Mark Meadows already turned over to the January 6 Committee, showing that everyone from Sean Hannity to Don Jr were desperately contacting Meadows begging him to get Trump to do something to halt the assault on the Capitol…
With her forceful comments Cheney was, as TV lawyers have finally discovered, invoking the clause of the obstruction statute that DOJ has used to charge hundreds of the most serious January 6 rioters. Liz Cheney was stating that Trump’s actions on January 6 may demonstrate that he, along with hundreds of people he incited, had deliberately attempted to prevent the vote count.
Even as she was doing that a second time today, the judge presiding over most of the Proud Boys cases, Tim Kelly joined his colleague Dabney Friedrich in rejecting the challenge that Ethan Nordean had taken to that same application.*
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
A new survey provides little comfort about democracy’s future
The most basic disconnect from reality (and democratic values) remains the 2020 presidential winner. The survey reports, “94% of Democrats say [President] Biden is the rightful winner compared to just 26% of Republicans — a split that has also remained remarkably stable since Biden took office.” As a result, only 42 percent of Republicans have confidence in the outcome of elections compared to 80 percent of Democrats. That raises a question that was so prominent throughout the Senate runoffs in Georgia: Why vote if you think the whole thing is rigged?
The good news is that more detailed data shows not many Americans favor political violence as some previous surveys suggested. When the pollsters screened out “inattentive respondents” and provided definitions of various undemocratic behavior, they found “support is 9% for threats, 8% for harassment, 6% for non-violent felonies, 4% for violent felonies, 4% for violence if the other party wins the 2024 election, 4% for violence on January 6, and 5% for violence to restore Trump to the presidency.” The bad news is that still represents millions of people.
Eric Topol/LA Times:
Pandemic fatigue has Americans glossing over Omicron. But we can’t give up
For indoor gatherings, each person should be fully vaccinated with a booster shot, or, for someone with a confirmed prior COVID infection, at least one vaccine dose. They all should have frequent rapid antigen tests for the days prior to and time of gathering. These tests screen for whether a person is infectious, which is far more important than whether they have been infected but not capable of transmitting the virus. Ideally, all gatherings would be outdoors, but if that’s not possible, maximizing ventilation with windows open or HEPA air filtration with CO2 monitoring provides good air quality.
Unfortunately, most people won’t be willing or able to take these precautions for various reasons.
Jonah Goldberg/The Dispatch:
Donald Trump’s Megaphone
Fox News news hosts knew that Trump’s lies were lies—and they amplified them anyhow.
I’ve shown a good deal of restraint since news broke that I left Fox News.
I haven’t done any TV about it, and I’ve let a lot of nonsense go by without a response.
A major reason I chose to leave with more than a year left on my contract was that I felt conflicted about speaking freely. Fox understandably doesn’t like to pay people who criticize Fox or its talent, and there is something unseemly about it.
So that was one reason why I left.
Another was that I didn’t want to be complicit in so many lies.
That’s the thing. I know that a huge share of the people you saw on TV praising Trump were being dishonest. I don’t merely suspect it, I know it, because they would say one thing to my face or in my presence and another thing when the cameras and microphones were flipped on. And even when I didn’t hear it directly, I was often one degree of separation from it. (“Guess what so-and-so said during the commercial break?”) Punditry and politics is a very small world—especially on the right—and if you add-up all the congressmen, senators, columnists, producers, editors, etc. you’ll probably end up with fewer people than the student population of a decent-sized liberal arts college.
Michael Brendan Dougherty/NRO:
Gone Too Far
The Capitol riot happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied.
Hearing the texts read aloud at this late date in the year does provide a sense of clarity. Many of Trump’s lies before this seemed to have little cost at all. Many of them had been brazened out until they produced a kind of success. The lies that Trump told that day to that crowd had produced this specific, televised disaster. Unfortunately, it was a predicted disaster. But almost everyone knew it was wrong while it was happening. It took effort to forget.
In the months after January 6, the politically correct move for Trump’s cable-news apologists has been to ignore the fact that the people who set about “investigating” the supposed vote fraud have turned up nothing of consequence or merit. Or, it has been to focus obsessively on the potential involvement of the FBI or other intel agencies in the riots, to speculate about who may have been planted as agent provocateurs in the crowd. This is worth inquiring about, especially after the FBI’s cack-handed work trying to instigate a kidnapping plot against Governor Whitmer went south.
But the riot at the Capitol happened because President Donald Trump simply lied, and lied, and lied. On that very day he lied about what the vice president’s powers were. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” he told the crowd.
NY Times:
Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power
A small circle of Republican lawmakers, working closely with President Donald J. Trump’s chief of staff, took on an outsize role in pressuring the Justice Department, amplifying conspiracy theories and flooding the courts in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
Mr. Donoghue [DOJ] had spent weeks fielding calls, emails and in-person requests from President Donald J. Trump and his allies, all of whom asked the Justice Department to declare, falsely, that the election was corrupt. The lame-duck president had surrounded himself with a crew of unscrupulous lawyers, conspiracy theorists, even the chief executive of MyPillow — and they were stoking his election lies.
Mr. Trump had been handing out Mr. Donoghue’s cellphone number so that people could pass on rumors of election fraud. Who could be calling him now?
It turned out to be a member of Congress: Representative Scott Perry, Republican of Pennsylvania, who began pressing the president’s case. Mr. Perry said he had compiled a dossier of voter fraud allegations that the department needed to vet. Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who had found favor with Mr. Trump, could “do something” about the president’s claims, Mr. Perry said, even if others in the department would not.
WaPo:
Role as Trump’s gatekeeper puts Meadows in legal jeopardy — and at odds with Trump
From his time as chief of staff for Donald Trump, Mark Meadows has provided a gold mine of information to the House committee investigating the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection: urgent texts from the president’s son, pleas from GOP lawmakers and exhortations from Fox News hosts calling on him to get Trump to stop the attack.
But now his proximity as Trump’s former gatekeeper and top aide has thrust Meadows into legal jeopardy — even as the revelations in the texts and his new book also threaten his standing with Trump.
Meadows in recent weeks has veered between steps aimed at bolstering his former boss and actions that, intentionally or not, have undermined him. His new book treats the former president as a hero but also angered Trump by revealing that he was much sicker from covid-19 than previously known and that his first positive coronavirus test was kept hidden. And Meadows has now stopped cooperating with the Jan. 6 committee after first supplying thousands of pages of damning material, leading to a House vote this week holding him in contempt of Congress.
The panel’s months-long investigation has revealed the myriad ways in which Meadows is inextricably bound to the Jan. 6 attack, serving less as chief of staff than chief enabler to a president who was desperate to hold onto power.
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