It Was Trump’s Plot All Along: Will We Hold Him Accountable? –

Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney, Vice Chair of the House Select Committee investigating Trump’s insurrection: NAJ screen shot

By Glynn Wilson –

The American experiment in democracy has been saved at critical points over the past 246 years by a number of brave actions, yes, but also a fair number of haphazard accidents — and a few political ironies. If this form of government survives over the next couple of years, it may be because of one of the most unlikely ironies of them all: The courage and wisdom of “Darth Vader” Dick Cheney’s daughter.

It’s still hard to forgive the damage Dick Cheney and his president, George W. Bush, did to our democracy 20 years ago when they distorted the September 11, 2001 crisis and invaded Iraq, which was tantamount to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, something Bush recently admitted publicly in a Freudian slip.

But just maybe, somehow, having Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney co-lead the House Select Committee to investigate Donald Trump’s insurrection there might be a sliver of hope that democracy can be saved once more, and we can skate by this crisis of constitutional democracy and survive to fight another day.

If you watched any of the “landmark” hearing Thursday night in prime time, which of course is being compared to the Watergate hearings that brought down Richard Nixon, you know what happened and what was said.

Related: Trump’s Criminal Presidency Returns to Prime Time

In it’s newspaper of record style, The New York Times summarized it for readers, and followed the committee’s framing of the narrative by keeping Trump at the center of the plot to overthrow our democratically elected government.

The House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol opened a landmark set of hearings on Thursday by showing video of aide after aide to former President Donald J. Trump testifying that his claims of a stolen election were false, as the panel laid out in meticulous detail the extent of the former president’s efforts to keep himself in office.

Over about two hours, the panel offered new information about what it characterized as an attempted coup orchestrated by Mr. Trump that culminated in the deadly assault on the Capitol. The panel’s leaders revealed that investigators heard testimony that Mr. Trump endorsed the hanging of his own vice president as a mob of his supporters descended on Congress. They also said they had evidence that members of Mr. Trump’s cabinet discussed invoking the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.

The session kicked off an ambitious effort by the nine-member committee, which was formed after Republicans blocked the creation of a nonpartisan commission, to lay out the full story of a remarkable assault on U.S. democracy, orchestrated by a sitting president, that led to a deadly riot, an impeachment and a crisis of confidence in the political system.

‘Trump Was at the Center’: Jan. 6 Hearing Lays Out Case in Vivid Detail

But as our readers know, since that Wednesday on Jan. 6, 2021, we pointed out that Trump was not alone.

He had collaborators and co-consprators inside the Capital in Congress, in the Capitol Police force and inside the Department of Defense who nearly turned the tide for him. It was only by some miracle that enough cops stood up to Trump’s insurrectionist forces that we made it through that day, that Joe Biden was sworn in as president, and that here we are today finally watching the results of an investigation into what went wrong.

So as I listened to Ms. Cheney speak, this quotation rang out to me like no other.

“As part of our investigation, we will present information about what the White House and other intelligence agencies knew, and why the Capitol was not better prepared. But we will not lose sight of the fact that the Capitol Police did not cause the crowd to attack. And we will not blame the violence that day, violence provoked by Donald Trump, on the officers who bravely defended all of you.”

If you are so interested, you can read the full remarks of Vice Chair Cheney and Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson on the committee’s website, with no newspaper paywall to get past and without having to endure the ads on commercial television websites.

THOMPSON & CHENEY OPENING STATEMENTS AT SELECT COMMITTEE HEARING

What you will hear in the coming days — in the absence of a full-blown bipartisan commission investigation and report — is a framing of the story of Jan. 6 that keeps Trump at the center of the plot and let’s some of Trump’s co-conspirators off the hook, including cops who let rioters in and members of Congress like Mo Brooks and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

It is now crystal clear that this is the framing of the story insisted on by Ms. Cheney for her role in leading the investigation of this “conspiracy” and “coup attempt.”

It may very well work.

Yet it may not.

Her political future is still in doubt. She is now a pariah among the Republican faithful, although she is being championed now by millions of Democrats on social media as a hero.

We will see if this framing of the narrative works. We will see if it helps us keep our democracy going in November of this year and through 2024.

If it does, then Ms. Cheney will be the unlikely hero here, and I will praise her name for the rest of my days.

If it doesn’t work, well, you know how I feel.

You may recall in the 2020 debates what Mr. Biden said when castigating Trump for not telling the American people the whole truth about Covid. He said, in effect, “the American people can handle the truth.”

Maybe Liz Cheney is right when she concludes they cannot.

Here are some of the key moments according to the New York Times, the ones I choose to highlight.

Trump was at the center of the plot.

The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and vice chairwoman, Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, began laying out what they described as an elaborate, intentional scheme by Mr. Trump to remain in power, one unprecedented in American history and with dangerous implications for democracy.

“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Mr. Thompson said.

Both leaders had blistering words for Mr. Trump and about the threat he poses to American democracy. They made it clear that, for all his ongoing bluster about stolen elections, Mr. Trump had knowingly spread claims about election fraud that people closest to him knew were false, tried to use the apparatus of government and the courts to cling to power, and then when all of that failed, sat back approvingly in the White House as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol threatening to hang his vice president.

Key figures around Trump never believed his lie of a stolen election.
The hearing used the videotaped testimony of some of Mr. Trump’s closest aides and allies to show that the Trump campaign and his White House — and perhaps the president himself — had known well that Joseph R. Biden Jr. won the 2020 election. It showed how Mr. Trump and his loyalists had used a calculated campaign of lies to bind his followers and build support for his attempt to stay in power, through extralegal means and violence.

The committee played excerpts from videotaped interviews of former Attorney General William P. Barr, who said he had told Mr. Trump that the talk of widespread fraud in the 2020 election was “bullshit.” There was a clip of his daughter Ivanka Trump saying that she accepted Mr. Barr’s conclusions and of a campaign lawyer, Alex Cannon, who told Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, that Trump allies had found no election issues that could reverse the results in key states. “So there’s no there there?” Mr. Meadows responded, according to Mr. Cannon’s account.

At one point, in one of the most potentially damaging moments of the videotaped interviews, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is shown dismissing the threats of Pat A. Cipollone, then the White House counsel, to resign in the face of Mr. Trump’s machinations as “whining.”

There is more to come on Trump’s role

The hearing concluded with a hint of what was to come in the next hearings, which committee members hope will show how Mr. Trump was personally responsible for the worst attack on the Capitol since the British ransacked it in 1814 and that he remains a threat to the American democratic experiment.

The committee concluded with videos of the rioters themselves saying they believed they were invited to Washington that day by their president, who had asked them to fight for him.

“He lit the fuse that ultimately resulted in the violence of Jan. 6,” Mr. Thompson, the committee’s chairman, said of Mr. Trump.

So OK, fine by me. Let’s focus on Trump — and get to the bottom of the case by finally filing criminal charges against the former president that will stick in court and prevent him from ever running for public office again.

If that happens, Liz Cheney will deserve a place in the history books for saving this democracy one more time.

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