Last Week's J6 Hearing Was like Watching a Gangster Movie
The evidence against Trump and his co-conspirators reminds me of every organized crime film I’ve ever seen
Someone might want to check the Capital roof.
While speaking at an event hosted by Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice in Washington last April, Representative Jamie Raskin, a House 1/6 committee member, outlined the committee’s plans for this month’s public hearings with revelations. Raskin said new information in the upcoming hearings would “blow the roof off the House.” Then Raskin made a statement that made my jaw drop at the time:
Speaking about the threats to Pence on Jan. 6 and the chants by rioters to hang him, Raskin said the vice president's Secret Service agents — including one who was carrying the nuclear football — ran down to an undisclosed place in the Capitol. Those agents, who Raskin said he suspects were reporting to Trump’s Secret Service agents, were trying to whisk Pence away from the Capitol.
Pence then "uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I've seen so far: 'I'm not getting in that car,'" Raskin said.
"He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do," Raskin said.
The original narrative was that Pence, having rejected pressure from The Former Guy to de-certify the 2020 election, Pence stayed at the Capitol for the sole purpose of doing his patriotic duty.
But the picture the Maryland Democrat painted that day was reminiscent of the scene from Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather Part 2 when Sal Tessio, a lieutenant of the Corleone family, played by Abe Vigoda, gets “taken for a ride” for disloyalty.
Just as the mainstream media was reluctant to call out Trump’s constant lying and embrace of white supremacy, it has also been slow to acknowledge how much Trump behaves like an organized crime boss.
Earlier this month, we learned Mark Short, Pence’s former chief of staff, contacted Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to warn them of a potential security risk to the Vice President, according to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times:
The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it…
…Mr. Short did not know what form such a security risk might take, according to people familiar with the events. But after days of intensifying pressure from Mr. Trump on Mr. Pence to take the extraordinary step of intervening in the certification of the Electoral College count to forestall Mr. Trump’s defeat, Mr. Short seemed to have good reason for concern. The vice president’s refusal to go along was exploding into an open and bitter breach between the two men at a time when the president was stoking the fury of his supporters who were streaming into Washington.
During last week’s prime-time hearing, Representative and committee vice-chair Liz Cheney seemed to confirm this line of thinking, dropping one of the hearing’s many bombshells (via The Washington Post):
“You will hear testimony that ‘the president did not really want to put anything out’ calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,” Cheney said. “You will hear the President Trump was yelling and ‘really angry’ at advisers who told him he needed to be doing something more…
…Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment as: ‘Maybe our supporters have the right idea…Mike Pence ‘deserves it'.”
Think about it. Even though hundreds of violent insurrectionists wanted to string him up on sight, Pence chose to stay hidden at the Capital and take his chances rather than leave with the Secret Service.
Fortunately, Pence made it through January 6 unharmed. Luckily for the country, he did the honorable—and legal—thing. But in doing so, he violated a rule anyone who’s watched The Godfather Part 2 knows: you don’t ever take sides with anyone against the family. Ever.
The J6 committee’s first hearing gave us plenty of bread crumbs
One of the first snippets of video the J6 committee showed was an excerpt from the deposition of Jason Miller, the former president’s campaign spokesman. Miller testified that Matt Oczkowski, a campaign data expert, told Trump during a phone call that based on election returns, he would lose the election (Miller has since complained that the clip takes his comments out of context, a spin attempt that surprised absolutely no one).
The media has overlooked Miller’s testimony in the days since the hearing, and to be fair, his video clip wasn’t particularly illuminating. But seeing him on the committee’s big screen reminded me of his interview with George Stephanopoulos on November 1, just days before the 2020 election, which I wrote about at the time. In it, Miller foreshadows the Stop the Steal voter fraud disinformation angle:
If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range.
And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election. We believe that we will be over 290 electoral votes on election night. So no matter what they try to do, what kind of hi-jinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense, they try to pull off, we’re still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump reelected.
Also of interest is the select committee’s focus last week on the Oath Keepers militia and the Proud Boys. The committee presented compelling evidence of coordination between the Trump campaign and the two right-wing extremist groups. During the hearing, we learned that as many as three hundred Proud Boys engaged in a reconnaissance operation at the U.S. Capital hours before Trump’s rally began.
Earlier this month, prosecutors charged Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, and four other group members with seditious conspiracy related to allegations of their involvement in planning and participating in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Although the committee didn’t highlight it last week, the close ties between the Proud Boys and the Republican Party bear mentioning.
At the time of the insurrection, Tarrio was also the Florida state director of Latinos for Trump. As The New York Times reported earlier this month, the far-right extremist group members have taken control of the Miami-Dade wing of the GOP. At least six current or former Proud Boys have secured seats on the party’s Miami-Dade Executive Committee, including several currently facing criminal charges for their participation in the insurrection.
It will be interesting to see how much the committee delves into this issue in tomorrow’s hearing, which focuses on Trump’s fraudulent disinformation campaign.
In terms of live witnesses, we can expect testimony from The Former Guy’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, and former Fox News executive Chris Stirewalt, who was part of the network’s team that called Arizona for Biden during the 2020 election.
Also testifying are Al Schmidt, former City Commissioner of Philadelphia, and BJay Pak, the former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia.
Is 10:00 in the morning too early for popcorn?
With three hearings scheduled for this week, the select committee will have an opportunity to solidify its case further. But so far, at least, they’ve delivered on congressman Raskin’s promise to “blow the roof off of the House.”
