WaPo’s editorial board takes on the RNC: "legitimate political discourse" to the GOP is all about punishing Cheney and Kinzinger by censure, because none of the Select Committee’s targets are not “ordinary citizens” by any means.
The Republican Party on Friday took an official stand — against truth and democracy. At the Republican National Committee’s winter meeting in Salt Lake City, party leaders censured Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and moved to aid her primary opponent, Harriet Hageman, who is former president Donald Trump’s preferred candidate for Wyoming’s lone congressional seat.
The Orwellian censure resolution accuses Ms. Cheney and fellow GOP dissident Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) of engaging in behavior “destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.” Her transgression? Co-leading the House committee investigating the Capitol invasion, an act of political violence Mr. Trump inspired when he was a sitting president charged with protecting the nation from enemies foreign and domestic. The investigation, the censure resolution claimed, is “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
[...]
By asserting, as their censure resolution did Friday, that truth is fiction and patriots are turncoats, they have exposed the dark, festering core of what their party is becoming: an unruly revolt against fact and reason that betrays the principles leaders, such as former president Ronald Reagan, championed.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
We don’t have to accept this dodge. The official position being articulated here is that there’s no need for any national political accounting with regard to the role that Trump and his co-conspirators played in inciting that violence.
In essence, Republicans want to decouple the violence from the orchestrators of it. The GOP’s official party position has become that the orchestrators of insurrection are above accountability entirely.
Cheney, meanwhile, is coming in for additional punishment. As The Post reports, the Wyoming GOP has privately arranged for the national party to financially back Cheney’s primary challenger. Cheney’s effort to purge the party of its insurrectionist elements has itself become disqualifying in today’s GOP.
www.washingtonpost.com/…
It remains to be seen whether Mike Pence will be Biglygate’s ‘John Dean’.
Considering that Trump will never appear before an Congressional committee, Mike Pence in front of the Select Committee will be must-see TV for the 1/6 Select Committee, because if anything Mike Pence is so conservative that he demonstrated that the rule of law actually might still exist despite the attempted coup. Pence will confirm the facts discovered in Select Committee sessions with a majority of his brain trust (sic).
Meanwhile the Federalist Society is trying to rehabilitate Pence for 2024 in case the Mango gets peeled and DeathSantis goes to jail. OTOH Trump admitting to the coup under oath could be the ultimate gamble for him, and it would have to be on TV.
The Washington Post published a bombshell story about a December 2020 memo laying out how Donald Trump could try to use the National Security Agency and the Department of Defense to search communications records in an attempt to prove that foreign powers had tried to help President Biden win the 2020 election. Copies of the memo were circulated among Trump allies and some Republican senators. Trump, in the end, didn’t follow the memo’s recommendations. The memo’s existence underscores both the extreme lengths Trump and his allies considered to overturn the election and how little the public knows today about those efforts.
What is clear is that there were multiple memos floating around Trump circles with all kinds of outlandish proposals to try and help the former president retain power. The New York Times published its own story on a different memo laying out how Trump would set up his own slate of electors to propel him to reelection. Fourteen “alternate electors” were subpoenaed by the January 6 select committee last week.
The committee is undoubtedly going to give the memos and circumstances around them a high level of scrutiny. Right now, the panel is examining Trump’s connections to plans to seize voting machines, the Times reported this past week. That part of the committee’s investigation is partially based on documents from the Trump White House. Documents like that are invaluable to the committee’s work (partially because they weren’t ripped up by Trump himself beyond any reconstruction). The National Archives is also planning on handing over more documents to the committee, this time related to former Vice President Mike Pence and January 6. It stands to reason that these papers could tell the committee—and eventually us—something about who lobbied Pence not to certify the electors.
The committee has also had some success in interviewing people of interest. Months after having been found in contempt of Congress for refusing to cooperate with the committee, former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark met with the committee for multiple hours on Wednesday. Clark drafted a letter in December 2020, which he asked acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to sign, to officials in the state of Georgia suggesting that the state name a new slate of electors (Rosen refused). Clark did more than that, too, and the committee surely had many interesting questions for him. The leader of the hard-right Oath Keepers militia also talked with the January 6 committee for six hours. Stewart Rhodes, who is being held in a federal detention facility on sedition charges, is widely believed to have had a hand in orchestrating the violence at the Capitol (he pleaded not guilty to the charges).
newrepublic.com/…
At today’s Federalist Society conference In Florida an explicit rebuke from former Vice President Pence who says, "President Trump is wrong...Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election."
NY Times: “President Trump is wrong,” said Mr. Pence, in his remarks before the Federalist Society, a conservative legal organization.
The comments marked the strongest rejection of Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election by his former vice president. Mr. Pence refused to give in to Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign on Jan. 6 to change the results and has remained relatively quiet about that decision since leaving office. He had largely declined to directly attack Mr. Trump or assign him any blame for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol. In public appearances last year, Mr. Pence defended his role in resisting Mr. Trump but did not go further than saying the two men will never “see eye to eye about that day.”
But tensions have been rising in recent days between the two men. As Mr. Pence positions himself for a possible presidential bid in 2024, Mr. Trump has pushed more intensely a false narrative aimed at blaming his former vice president for failing to stop President Biden from taking office.
Mr. Pence cast his opposition on Friday as larger than the immediate political moment, implying that the false claims pushed by Mr. Trump and his followers threatened to undermine American democracy.
“The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes,” he said. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”
In a speech that largely focused on attacking the policies and record of the Biden administration, Mr. Pence disavowed several of the falsehoods being pushed by Mr. Trump and his base about the election. He described Jan. 6 as a “dark day” in Washington, breaking with the right wing of his party that has attempted to rewrite history by describing the siege as a peaceful rally and by calling the rioters “political prisoners.” And he urged Mr. Trump and his party to accept the results of the last election.
“Whatever the future holds, I know we did our duty that day,” Mr. Pence said. “I believe the time has come to focus on the future.”
www.nytimes.com/...