The latest test of Trump’s leverage in the Republican Party comes on Tuesday, as he has backed the challengers of two Republican incumbents, one who voted for impeachment, and one who attacked him over the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Trump is backing State Rep. Russell Fry who is running against Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC), and former State Rep. Katie Arrington, who is challenging Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC).
Anybody have a list because i'm voting in the primary Tuesday in SC and i will vote them out… https://t.co/dlMPbxwsqU
Tom Rice is one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. His decision to do so was was a curious one, as his district voted for Trump by a 19-point margin in 2020.
Rice defended his impeachment vote, claiming “Defending the Constitution is a bedrock of the Republican platform, defend the Constitution, and that’s what I did. That was the conservative vote.”
In response, at a rally in South Carolina, Trump ripped Rice, saying, “And now Tom Rice looks like a total fool.”
Russell Fry is portraying Rice as a “traitor” to the district.
In Tuesday’s other race, freshman Rep. Nancy Mace predicted she will beat the Trump-backed Arrington by double digits.
Arrington ran previously in the district and defeated former Governor Mark Sanford in the primary but lost in the general election.
Mace drew Trump’s ire for voting to hold former Trump advisor Steve Bannon in contempt of Congress for ignoring a subpoena from the Democrats’ January 6 committee.
Perhaps realizing that she made a powerful enemy, Mace would later travel to New York City, seemingly for the sole purpose of standing outside of Trump Tower and pretending she was a big Trump supporter.
And while some Republicans who, immediately following the Capitol riot were critical of Trump and later softened their stance, Rice definitely has not.
“He watched it (Jan. 6) happen. He reveled in it. And he took no action to stop it. I think he had a duty to try to stop it, and he failed in that duty. He’s the past. I hope he doesn’t run again. And I think if he does run again, he hurts the Republican Party. We desperately need somebody who’s going to bring people together. And he is not that guy.”
Tom Rice, one of the 10 House Republicans to vote on impeaching Trump, trails in the Republican primary for South Carolina’s 7th district by 17 points.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) didn't make any new friends in the GOP with her star turn bashing former President Trump in prime time on Thursday night. It doesn't bother her a bit.
Cheney, a dynastic figure who sits in the House seat once held by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, used her high perch on the Jan. 6 select committee to accuse Trump of abusing the powers of the presidency to orchestrate nothing short of an attempted coup — explosive charges that have reinforced her status as Public Enemy No. 1 in the eyes of the MAGA faithful.
The much-watched hearing has further complicated Cheney’s path to reelection in deep-red Wyoming, a Trump stronghold where her primary opponent has the energetic backing of the 45th president, who is actively stumping against the mutinous incumbent.
But as Cheney's attacks on Trump have grown only louder, it's increasingly clear that she's motivated by something other than securing her future in the lower chamber. Whether that thing is a self-sacrificing desire to save the country's democratic traditions from the former president or an egomaniacal effort to advance her own fame and political powers largely depends on the perspective of her fans and critics.
What is not in question is that Cheney has staked her legacy on her relentless anti-Trump activism — a reputation that will become only more deeply entrenched as the select committee airs its investigative findings in a long series of public hearings that will dominate discussion in Washington through the rest of the month.
“President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney, the vice chairwoman of the select committee, said during the panel’s prime-time hearing Thursday night.
For the like-minded Trump critics, Cheney is an enormous asset to the investigation, offering the committee not only a good dose of bipartisan legitimacy, but also a seasoned legal mind who knows the ins and outs of the GOP conference and its complicated dealings with the former president.
“She’s an awesome lawyer, … [and] she was the chair of the House Republican Conference,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a former professor of constitutional law who also sits on the investigative panel. “So she obviously knows the terrain better than anyone else on the committee.”
To Trump’s allies on and off of Capitol Hill, however, Cheney is simply a traitor to the party — a “Pelosi Republican” who’s been all but disowned as GOP leaders try to tap Trump’s popularity in their effort to flip control of the House in November’s midterm elections.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who wants to take the speakership next year, said this week that the responsibility for the Jan. 6 falls on “everybody in the country.”
In one sense, Cheney is an unlikely figure to assume the role of Republican iconoclast. Her family ranks among the most powerful GOP dynasties of the last half century, and her father's unique brand of conservatism — combined with his no-apologies approach to power-policymaking — made him a favorite with the Republican base.
In a similar vein, Liz Cheney’s staunch conservative positions — including strong attacks on gay marriage during an early campaign — made her a villain in the eyes of Democrats nationwide, but helped propel her quickly into the leadership ranks once she arrived on Capitol Hill in 2017.
In another sense, however, Cheney is the natural fit to play Trump's foil.
Trump had devoted much of his successful 2016 campaign bashing the overseas entanglements of the Bush-Cheney administration, most notably the 2003 decision to launch the Iraq War, which was championed by the elder Cheney. After taking the White House, Trump continued those attacks on the old Republican guard that had pushed an aggressively interventionist foreign policy, a group that included both of the Cheneys.
Although Cheney had opposed Trump’s first impeachment, she was furious with his actions surrounding the attack on the Capitol, where a violent mob of Trump supporters tried to overturn his election defeat. More than 150 police officers were injured in the rampage.
Cheney was one of just 10 Republicans to support Trump’s impeachment following the riot, and she’s jumped headfirst into her role investigating the tragedy. On Thursday, she used the platform of the televised hearing to warn those Republicans still backing Trump that history won’t treat them kindly.
“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain,” she said.
Supporters of the far-reaching investigation note the significance of having a Republican of Cheney’s stature joining the probe.
“It's important, because like she said, this is not about political parties, or your political views. It's about finding out the truth,” U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell said following the hearing. “And from what the committee laid out today, it seems like there's a lot more that needs to be done.”
But Cheney’s recalcitrance has come with political costs.
Last year, after Cheney refused to stop criticizing Trump for his role in the Capitol riot, the GOP conference voted overwhelmingly to boot her out of leadership, replacing her with a Trump loyalist, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), who has embraced the former president's lies about a stolen election.
More recently, the Republican National Committee voted to condemn Cheney — along with the only other Republican on the select committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — for their willingness to join Democrats in the Jan. 6 investigation. That decision, the Republican National Committee charged, “has been destructive to the institution of the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party and our republic.”
In the wake of Thursday’s select committee hearing, the attacks on Cheney from Trump’s allies have grown only more pronounced. During the hearing, Tucker Carlson, the wildly popular Fox News pundit, characterized Cheney as “the Iraq War lady” who’s now “lecturing us about honor and truth.”
Carlson’s guest was Joe Kent, a Trump supporter from Washington state who’s launched a primary challenge against Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-Wash.), who also supported Trump’s second impeachment. He, too, had some sharp words for the Wyoming Republican.
“It's absolutely absurd and insulting,” Kent said of Cheney’s attacks on Trump’s defenders. “She thinks that we can't go back and look at her record that she has been lying to the American people basically for her entire career and profiting off of it, but also she has to bring up this whole, ‘Oh it must be a big Trump thing.’”
Kent said the Capitol rioters were in Washington on Jan. 6 not because of anything Trump did or said, but because “a vast majority” of Americans “did not feel like their voices were heard at the election box, and therefore things started to get a little bit dicey.”
In the face of such attacks, Cheney has found a new group of allies: Democrats, who have always opposed her conservative policy prescriptions, but are now cheering her on as she takes on a shared adversary in Trump.
“Liz Cheney and I do not agree on almost probably 80 percent of the contentious issues that come up, give or take 10 points,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters this week. “But what she is standing up for is the truth.”
“That's why she was removed as the leader of the Republican Party,” he continued. “Because the Republican Party didn't want to hear the truth."
The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack is hours away from the first of its highly anticipated series of public hearings.
The prime-time hearing kicks off at 8 p.m. on Thursday and will be aired on the big three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, as well as cable networks CNN and MSNBC. Fox News announced it will not air the hearing on its main network.
The committee described Thursday’s hearing as an initial summary of a “coordinated, multi-step effort” to overturn the 2020 election results, including previously unseen material and witness testimony.
Here are five things to watch for at tonight’s hearing:
How strongly the committee connects Trump to the riot
Some Democrats have voiced hope that the panel’s findings will amp up pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute former President Trump for his role in the attack.
But exactly how strong the committee connects Trump himself to the riot remains a central question of the panel’s hearings.
But Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who sits on the panel, said in a Washington Post Live interview on Monday that the committee has found evidence on Trump that supports “a lot more than incitement,” the charge Democrats laid out in their second impeachment trial against Trump.
Raskin said he believed Trump and the White House were at the “center” of Jan. 6.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here, and we’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” Raskin said.
How the committee leverages testimony from Trump’s inner circle
The committee has conducted more than 1,000 interviews in its yearlong investigation, subpoenaed more than 100 people and has promised to share video footage of some of its depositions.
The committee has pledged to air footage from interviews with “Trump White House officials, senior Trump administration officials, Trump campaign officials and indeed Trump family members,” the aide said.
The panel also sat down with a wide range of senior Trump White House officials, including some who were with the former president on Jan. 6.
It has also sat down with former Justice Department officials who spoke about Trump's pressure campaign at the department, as well as with legal advisers to former Vice President Mike Pence.
The committee has also interviewed multiple Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son; his fiancee, Kimberly Guilfoyle; Ivanka Trump, the president’s eldest daughter; and her husband, Jared Kushner.
Those videotaped testimonies will be part of a multimedia presentation. The committee hired a veteran ABC producer to assist with assembling the videos as it looks to transform its evidence into a ready-for-TV package.
How organized groups played a role in spurring violence
Among the thousands of people who traveled to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6 were extremist groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Dozens of these groups’ members have been charged in connection with the riot.
The role of the Proud Boys is expected to come into particular focus on Thursday when documentarian Nick Quested appears as a witness.
Quested filmed footage of Proud Boys members during the Capitol breach and a Jan. 5 meeting between the leaders of the two extremist groups.
The committee also subpoenaed people affiliated with the “Stop the Steal” movement, with one organizer having said the group intended to direct Ellipse rally attendees to a subsequent event on Capitol grounds.
How the committee looks ahead to future elections
Perceptions of the committee’s end goal are varied among lawmakers. Some Democrats hope the hearings will provide a high-stakes history lesson for the public, while others desire greater accountability for the riot’s central players.
As Democrats weigh their options, the panel itself has reportedly become divided about what long-term reforms to implement.
Axios reported on Sunday that Raskin has argued for abolishing the Electoral College to prevent future subversion of the electoral counting process. But Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the panel’s vice chair, has voiced opposition to that proposal out of concerns it would diminish the committee’s credibility, according to the outlet.
Axios reported that other committee members have pushed more modest reforms, like changes to the Electoral Count Act and federal voting rights legislation.
How Republicans combat the hearing’s messaging
The panel scheduled its first hearing for prime time in attempts to cut through to large swaths of the American public, but the committee is already facing headwinds.
Fox News announced it will not air the hearing on its cable channel, although its lower-profile sister network Fox Business will do so. Prominent Fox News host Tucker Carlson will host his show at 8 p.m. on Thursday just as the hearing begins.
The GOP is arguing the hearings are just meant to distract voters from issues like inflation and crime. The House Committee on Administration Republicans sent a letter to the Jan. 6 panel asking it to preserve all records in preparation for an investigation of the investigation.
At House Republican leadership’s press conference earlier on Thursday, just one of nine attending lawmakers said they would tune in to Thursday’s hearing: Rep. Kelly Armstrong (N.D.).
The biggest moment of the Jan. 6 House Select Committee’s existence is about to arrive.
On Thursday evening, the panel will hold the first of its televised hearings. The event will take place in prime time and be broadcast by almost every major network and news channel.
For some, it will be the most dramatic congressional investigation since the Watergate hearings a half-century ago.
Others — committed supporters of former President Trump, in particular — will likely tune out the hearings.
Here are five big questions that have yet to be answered.
What will we learn that’s new about Trump?
Democrats are promising explosive revelations about the former president’s role in fomenting the attack on the Capitol.
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) on Tuesday promised in a CNN interview, “We’re going to see how much Trump was involved. Trump ran this show. He ran it from the time he lost the election in November, and he did it with his son, or sons, and all of his henchmen up there.”
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, told The Washington Post in a Monday interview that the panel had “found evidence about a lot more than incitement here.”
Raskin added, “I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events. That’s the only way of really making sense of them all.”
Ironically, the main difficulty Democrats may face in making the case against Trump is the vast amount that is already known.
Trump was, after all, impeached by the House only one week after the insurrection, becoming the only president in history to be impeached on two separate occasions.
At a rally at the Ellipse near the White House, immediately before the assault on the Capitol, he told supporters, “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he also told them that President Biden, if certified as the election’s winner, would be an illegitimate president.
There have also been subsequent media leaks about other things the panel may have uncovered — including, recently, the suggestion that Trump was sympathetic to the demands of some of his supporters to “hang Mike Pence,” then the sitting vice president.
There could be more shocking evidence to come. But the knowledge already in existence sets a high bar.
Can the panel incriminate the Republican Party more broadly?
The committee famously features just two Republicans — Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), who serves as vice chair, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.) — both of whom are vigorous Trump critics.
That leaves the wider GOP in the panel’s crosshairs, especially if it can pin culpability for specific misdeeds on other members of the party.
No fewer than 147 Republican members of Congress voted to invalidate the election results in some shape or form on the evening of the insurrection, with debris still littering the Capitol’s hallways.
Yet, at that time, senior members of the GOP were willing to acknowledge Trump’s culpability.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in February 2021 said on the Senate floor that Trump was “practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day.” In a recorded call with colleagues later obtained by two reporters for The New York Times, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) called Trump’s actions “atrocious and totally wrong.”
But McConnell voted to acquit Trump on the impeachment charge in the Senate and McCarthy made his peace much more publicly, traveling to Mar-a-Lago to meet Trump. Last week, Trump endorsed McCarthy for reelection to the House.
The GOP would far rather talk about the issues bedeviling Biden than Jan. 6.
But if the committee can make a compelling case with fresh and additional evidence, Republicans may have little choice.
Can the Democrats put on a show?
For good or for bad, the theater of politics matters.
So, one question will be how compelling Democrats can make the hearings.
The first hearing is likely to be the most important of all, much as the first presidential debate in a series tends also to be the most vital.
All three major broadcast networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, have said they will shelve their regular programming and replace it with live coverage of the Thursday hearing. So too have CNN and MSNBC. Controversially, Fox News will not air the hearing live, instead confining such coverage to Fox Business.
Conservatives have taken umbrage at the decision by the committee to turn to a former president of ABC News, James Goldston, to help make Thursday’s presentation as compelling as possible.
Axios, which first reported Goldston’s involvement, wrote that he was “busily producing” the hearing “as if it were a blockbuster investigative special.”
We’re about to see the results.
Do the hearings change the political agenda?
There is little doubt that Thursday’s hearing will eclipse almost all the political news out of Washington. For that night at least, it will be the only show in town.
But how long will that effect last?
Trump allies have promised “counterprogramming” to push back on the narrative being advanced by the committee.
House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) is kicking off that effort Wednesday, at a morning news conference with House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) and ardent Trump allies Reps. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Stefanik told Fox News that she and her colleagues were “pushing back against lame-duck Speaker [Nancy] Pelosi’s sham political witch hunt.”
More broadly, the White House has spent months on the defensive, embattled by a host of problems including inflation, high gas prices, an infant formula shortage and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The hearings will give Democrats a chance to put the GOP on the back foot — but for how long?
Can the panel shift public opinion?
Politically, this is the biggest question of all.
Many independent experts, and even some liberals, aren’t at all sure the answer is yes.
For all kinds of reasons, opinions around Jan. 6 have calcified.
While Democrats see Trump’s culpability as self-evident, many Republicans seem willing to dismiss anything the panel uncovers.
Meanwhile, a politically segmented media environment combines with the bias-reinforcing dynamics of social media to deepen those divisions.
That doesn’t mean the committee is wasting its time. New evidence regarding Jan. 6 is important by its nature.
President Donald Trump endorsed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) as “an outstanding Representative” and a “strong and fearless Leader” in a Truth Social post Saturday, despite revelations of McCarthy’s plot to ask Trump to resign after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021.
McCarthy, widely considered to become the Speaker of the House if Republicans win the midterm elections in November, represents California’s 23rd Congressional District.
“In Congress, Kevin is a tireless advocate for the people of Bakersfield and the Central Valley,” Trump said. “He is working incredibly hard to Stop Inflation, Deliver Water Solutions, and hold Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi Accountable for their catastrophic failures and dereliction of duty.”
McCarthy was caught on a recording with Republican leaders discussing a plan to ask President Trump to resign following the political fallout of the January 6 riot.
In the conversation, Never Trump Republican and January 6th Committee member Liz Cheney asked if McCarthy has discussed resignation with Trump. McCarthy replied that he had not asked the President yet, but he planned to do so.
“Again, the only discussion I would have with him is that, I think this will pass [Congress]” McCarhty said. “And it will be my recommendation [Trump] should resign. I mean, that would be my take. But I don’t think he would take it. But I don’t know.”
The item before Congress appears to be what would become the second impeachment case against Trump.
The comments were first reported by two New York Times reporters, Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, in their book “This Will Not Pass.”
Despite the recording, McCarthy vehemently denied making any comments about asking Trump to resign in a statement he posted to Twitter.
“The New York Time’s reporting on me is totally false and wrong,” McCarthy tweeted. “It comes as no surprise that the corporate media is obsessed with doing everything it can to further a liberal agenda. This promotional book tour is no different. If the reporters were interested in truth why would they ask for comment after the book was printed?”
“The past year and a half have proven that our country was better off when President Trump was in the White House…”
Trump’s base of MAGA voters was clearly miffed by the McCarthy endorsement, especially considering his resignation plot. Following Trump’s endorsement of the Congressman, his supporters booed the mention of McCarthy’s name at a rally over the weekend.
Twitter mentions of McCarthy’s endorsement refer to him as a RINO who lets Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) take advantage of him.
Let’s be clear, I support Trump but not RINO Kevin McCarthy.
— Gunther Eagleman (@GuntherEagleman) June 5, 2022
So, what could explain Trump’s endorsement of McCarthy? Trump’s endorsements range an assortment of candidates.
They are not all the same brand of MAGA Republicans as Trump himself, but Trump likes to pick winners and there is no other Republican running in McCarthy’s race who could beat him. It may be as simple as that.
QUICK QUESTION: Do any candidates running against Kevin McCarthy in District 20 have the slightest chance of beating him in the upcoming election? If not… it is wise for Trump to support him. Whatever Trump's strategy, it's evident that going public with it now isn't wise. -VJ
Trump explained his reasons for backing McCarthy in his own statement on Truth Social, where he listed a number of areas where McCarthy is leading Republicans in Congress.
“As Leader, Kevin is building a commitment to Americas platform to grow our economy, fight big tech censorship, secure the border, strengthen our military, defend the Second Amendment, improve our health care, restore American energy independence, support our brave veterans, and uphold the Rule of Law and American values.”
He concludes the endorsement saying, “Kevin McCarthy has my Complete and Total Endorsement for California’s 23rd Congressional District!”
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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) on Monday said the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol has found evidence on former President Trump that supports “a lot more than incitement.”
The Jan. 6 panel is set to hold its first public hearing on Thursday, where Raskin said the committee will lay out information regarding individuals who played a role in the attack — including Trump.
“The select committee has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here, and we’re gonna be laying out the evidence about all of the actors who were pivotal to what took place on Jan. 6,” Raskin said during an interview with Washington Post Live.
Trump was impeached in the House by a 232-197 vote, with 10 Republicans joining all Democrats in sanctioning the president. The following month, however, the Senate acquitted him in a 57-43 vote. Seven Senate Republicans joined the entire Democratic caucus in voting to convict.
The select committee says Thursday’s prime-time hearing, scheduled to begin at 8 p.m., will feature new material and witness testimony from the nearly yearlong investigation, which has largely been conducted behind the scenes
Raskin on Monday told The Washington Post Live that this week’s hearing will “tell the story of a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power.”
Asked if Trump is at the center of that conspiracy, Raskin said “I think that Donald Trump and the White House were at the center of these events.”
“That’s the only way really of making sense of them all,” he added.
He noted, however, that "people are going to have to make judgments themselves about the relative role that different people played."
The Maryland Democrat then pointed to Trump’s second impeachment, in which Raskin was the lead manager of the Senate trial.
“Of course the House and the Senate in bicameral and bipartisan fashion have already determined that the former president, Donald Trump, incited an insurrection by majority votes in the House and the Senate,” Raskin said.
“Although, Donald Trump wasn’t convicted by the requisite two-thirds majority, but commanding majority found that he had in fact incited this insurrection,” he added.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol is preparing for a crucial week as it prepares to finally share with the public the fruits of its months-long investigation into the riot in prime time on Thursday.
The 8 p.m. hearing kicking off a series of meetings shows the committee is eager to reach a broad segment of Americans and relay the extent to which democracy itself was at stake that day.
“The goal here is to construct this narrative,” said Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow in governance studies with Brookings.
“What they want to do is go through the countless depositions that they've taken and other evidence that they gathered and figure out a way to try and convey a story to the public.”
The challenge is making a captivating case for a wide audience, particularly those who feel they already know what happened that day or who are ready to move on from the attack.
According to polling from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, the country is nearly evenly divided on how much it wants to reflect on the day.
While 52 percent said it’s important to learn more about what happened, 48 percent said it was “time to move on.” The divide is almost entirely partisan.
“I do think that the committee will have difficulties in communicating messages because of the kind of segregated information environment in which a lot of the American public exists,” Ryan Goodman, co-director of the Reiss Center on Law and Security at New York University School of Law, told The Hill.
“That said, I do think the visual of a solemn public hearing and live testimony plus, in all likelihood video material, could focus attention in a way [for] the members of the American public are otherwise not thinking about these issues.”
Putting the hearing in prime-time shows the committee doesn’t want to just reach those who already view the attack as a grievous assault on democracy. It wants to reach independents and even conservatives who have heard GOP leaders brand the panel as a partisan witch hunt.
Jesse Rhodes, a political science professor who helped craft the UMass poll, said even with the sharp partisan divide, there are those who don’t have strong feelings about the attack.
“We're finding in the poll that about 19 percent of people are purely independent. And then there's another 9 percent who lean Democratic and another 8 percent lean Republican. So there is a little bit of mushiness in the middle. And those people potentially can be shifted,” he said, noting that just one-third of Americans strongly identify as conservative.
“If there really is damning evidence of long-term planning, involvement in collusion by the president or his top advisers … that does have the potential to move some people.”
Rhodes and others have warned the committee must be careful in how it frames such messaging.
“I think the most important [thing] might be this is not perceived as a Trump versus Biden frame, which the first impeachment hearing pretty much was, but rather it imparts a Trump versus Pence framework. I think that there are many people that are concerned about the direct threat to Mike Pence that occurred on Jan. 6,” Goodman said.
“I think that captures attention in a very different way. It’s not as political or partisan.”
There are signs the committee could be leaning in that direction. Multiple outlets reported the panel has been in discussions about inviting Pence’s legal advisers and chief of staff to testify.
“As soon as this is perceived as or appears to be a strictly partisan affair and an attack on the Republican Party as an institution, then you're going to get a lot of resistance or skepticism,” Rhodes said.
“To the degree that the messages can be about upholding and maintaining institutions and values that benefit people, regardless of party, the more you will get at least a willingness to hear some of these concerns.”
The panel’s makeup could help it.
Republicans in the House objected during the two committee impeachment proceedings on Trump, but the two Republicans on the Jan. 6 panel agree with its objectives.
“Each hearing is going to be different than I think a lot of what we're used to seeing because everyone is rowing in the same direction. So you have the Democrats and you have [Rep. Liz] Cheney [R-Wyo.] and [Rep. Adam] Kinzinger [R-Ill.], so the committee is bipartisan, but they are all in pursuit of a shared goal in a way that just is not true of other recent high profile investigations, whether it be the Trump impeachment or Benghazi,” Reynolds said.
“That’s going to make for a serious exposition of the facts that's just going to feel different than what we’ve gotten used to.”
Goodman said the absence of Republicans opposed to the committee’s mission will not just change the tone but even the way in which information is presented.
“I do not think that the hearings are going to be anything like the circus that has existed in hearings — and the impeachment hearings — in that past in which some members of Congress were simply playing to kind of a right-wing media. And so this will be a more solemn hearing which is going to be truth seeking, [that’s] the way in which I see it. And I don't think that hearings are going to be a source of disinformation. I think they're going to be a source of information,” he said.
The committee has not yet announced who will testify at the first hearing, but it has pledged to release never before seen footage from Jan. 6.
“The committee will present previously unseen material documenting January 6th, receive witness testimony, preview additional hearings, and provide the American people a summary of its findings about the coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power,” it said in a Thursday statement.
It’s not clear what type of footage the committee plans to present at the hearing.
While in the past it’s relied on visceral imagery — including an officer being smashed by rioters in a doorway and Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) barely escaping as the mob closed in on the Senate chamber — even new footage of the attack may seem repetitive to those who watched it unfold live on television.
But Goodman said video recordings from some of the committee’s more than 1,000 depositions could be captivating for the public.
Rhodes also said new information will be key, especially to break through in an unusually busy summer news cycle.
“It can be a challenge to get people to refocus on events that occurred in the past, especially when there's going to be a lot of elite disagreement between Democrats and Republicans about what happened and who was involved in with what culpability,” he said. “I think that's a real challenge even though it sounds like the committee is going to have a lot of really juicy and damning information to share.”
“They may be able to bring attention especially if they come out with some really shocking new revelations but it is going to be a challenge to break through everything that's going on right now.”
The drama surrounding the work of the Jan. 6 committee ramped up Friday with the news that former Trump adviser Peter Navarro had been indicted on two charges of contempt of Congress.
The charges, each of which carries a maximum penalty of a $100,000 fine and one year of jail time, stem from Navarro’s refusal to cooperate with the House panel’s inquiries.
The new twist comes as the panel moves to the cusp of beginning public hearings. The first such event is due for Thursday.
Navarro, who on Friday initially announced his intention to defend himself, blasted the committee’s work and the manner in which he was arrested.
During his court appearance, he complained, “Who are these people? … This is not America. I mean, I was a distinguished public servant for four years, and nobody ever questioned my ethics. And they’re treating me in this fashion.”
Shortly afterward, speaking to reporters, he said he had been “intercepted” en route to Tennessee and placed in handcuffs and “leg irons.” He also sought to suggest his plight was simply an outgrowth of his support for former President Trump.
“They are not coming for me and Trump. They are coming for you,” he said, going on to detail the approximately 74 million people who voted for Trump at the 2020 election.
In fact, Navarro has been at the fore of propagating false theories of election fraud. He was also the leading proponent of a strategy known as the “Green Bay Sweep,” which was intended to reverse the election’s result.
Navarro’s next court appearance is scheduled for June 17, by which time the public hearings of the Jan. 6 panel will be well underway.
The effectiveness of those hearings will be judged according to two quite different criteria — the substantive information that is uncovered and the likely political effect.
On one hand, the importance of an investigation to look at such a serious assault on American democracy seems self-evident.
Back in April, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the committee, promised that the public hearings would “really blow the roof off the House.”
“This was not a coup directed at the president,” Raskin added in his remarks at a Georgetown University event. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against the Congress.”
On the other, there is deep skepticism, even among those who are supportive of the committee’s work, that the hearings will move the political needle.
That skepticism is rooted in the reality that there is plenty already known about the insurrection.
Trump was impeached 17 months ago for his role in inciting the riot. Given that a significant minority of the overall population — and a large majority of Republicans — continues to hold a favorable view of the former president, there is no obvious reason to believe the hearings will change their mind.
“Nothing they come up with is going to shift Trump or Trump’s base,” said Allan Lichtman, a professor of history at American University who authored a 2017 book making the case for the then-president’s impeachment.
“Look at all the things that have come out, and, if anything, Trump’s approval has ticked upward, not downward.”
Lichtman argued that critics of the former president are being overly optimistic in believing that the impact of the forthcoming hearings could be analogous to the Watergate hearings in 1973 and 1974 that transfixed the public and culminated in former President Nixon’s resignation.
In today’s hyperpolarized media and political environment, he added, Trump and his supporters will simply “say it’s a witch hunt” — and largely escape political consequence.
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, took a similar view.
“The hearings will give a lot more depth and sense of intentionality in terms of what the public knows,” he said. “Having that on the record and having more knowledge is a good thing. Whether it affects anything politically is pretty dubious. So much of it happened in front of everyone’s eyes.”
Democrats can at least hope that the hearings will focus public attention on Trump, the insurrection and the complicity of other Republicans in it. Such subjects are more favorable terrain for President Biden’s party than current troubles such as inflation, soaring gas prices and a baby formula shortage.
But Republicans will go all-out to blast the committee, just as Navarro did on Friday.
The only other person indicted for refusing to comply with a subpoena in similar circumstances — former Trump chief strategist Stephen Bannon — used his initial court appearances in a similar way, promising that his charge would end up being “the misdemeanor from hell for Merrick Garland, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden.”
With Navarro and Bannon indicted and the public hearings looming, another act in the insurrection drama is about to begin.
But most of the public has already made up its mind as to who are the heroes and the villains.
Businessman and former GOP New York gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino is set to jump into the race to represent New York’s 23rd District with the backing of House Republican Conference Chairwoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.).
Paladino confirmed to The Hill Friday evening that he is running for the seat, saying that he heard that there were a few people thinking of running that he did not respect, but he did not name names.
“Representing the people of Western New York would be a great honor, and I think I could be most effective at doing that,” Paladino said.
The dust had barely settled after Rep. Chris Jacobs (R-N.Y.) abruptly ended his reelection bid on Friday over backlash to his support for an assault weapons ban when Stefanik came out with the endorsement.
According to The Buffalo News, Paladino said earlier Friday that if Jacobs dropped out that he would throw his hat in the ring for the seat.
“Carl is a job creator and conservative outsider who will be a tireless fighter for the people of New York in our fight to put America First to save the country,” Stefanik said in a tweet posted on Friday evening.
Paladino said that Stefanik asked if he would mind if she endorsed him as soon as she heard he was running.
“She's a great girl,” Paladino said. “She’s got she got her head right where it belongs when it comes to leading for her people,”
Paladino, a real estate developer and ally of former President Trump, made national headlines in December 2016 when he sent racist remarks about former President Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama to local Buffalo, N.Y., outlet Artvoice.
He claimed at the time that he sent the comments in error.
He said that he would like to see Michelle Obama “return to being a male and let loose in the outback of Zimbabwe where she lives comfortably in a cave with Maxie, the gorilla.” Paladino added that he hoped President Obama would die of mad cow disease. Paladino apologized to “the minority community” for his comments.
At the time, Paladino sat on the Buffalo city school board. In August 2017, he was removed from that position after he was accused of improperly disclosing information about teacher contract negotiations.
Before that, Paladino was the Republican nominee for New York Governor in 2010.
Stefanik has since come to publicly and forcefully support Trump, including by being part of his impeachment defense team during the first impeachment proceedings against him in 2019.
Former House Speaker Paul Ryan campaigned for Representative Tom Rice on Wednesday, suggesting the South Carolina Republican’s vote to impeach Donald Trump was a gutsy call and railing against GOP “celebrities” trying to aid the former President’s “vengeance.”
The comments marked the first serious public rebuke of Trump by the former Speaker of the House, once considered the future of the GOP, in some time.
Rice was one of only 10 Republican lawmakers who voted in favor of impeaching Trump over his alleged role in inciting the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
Ryan praised his actions.
“There were a lot of people who wanted to vote like Tom but who just didn’t have the guts to do it,” Ryan said.
Former House @SpeakerRyan ripped brand-focused “entertainers” posing as lawmakers who are preoccupied with their careers rather than their constituents during a campaign stop for embattled @RepTomRice, whom he called a “workhorse.”https://t.co/OYqZM4jJZu
Paul Ryan continued to attack the Republican Party during his campaign speech to aid embattled Representative Tom Rice, calling out lawmakers who dare to support Trump.
Ryan embraced Rice as a “man of conviction” whose vote to impeach was a “vote for the Constitution.”
“This is just such a crystal clear case where you have a hard-working, effective, senior member of Congress who deserves reelection vs. people who are just trying to be celebrities who may be trying to help Trump with his vengeance,” he added.
“That’s not who voters want, voters want people focused on their solutions, not on Trump’s vengeance and that to me is a really clear-cut case here,” said Ryan.
B) Ryan on Trump: Look at Georgia last week..They voted for honest conservatives who are focused on their problems. They didn’t want to go for Donald Trump. Bloodlust, for vengeance. They wanted politicians who are going to work on solving their problems or tending to their needs
It’s unclear if Paul Ryan’s campaign efforts for Tom Rice will yield results, as the incumbent is currently trailing in polls to Russell Fry, the South Carolina Legislature’s majority whip, who earned Trump’s endorsement.
Fry, in an interview with Breitbart News, said the former President’s endorsement had been a boon for his campaign.
“The energy’s incredible, you know. Prior to the Trump endorsement, we were tracking well, we were very firmly in a one versus one kind of race,” Fry said.
“There’s several people in the race, but the endorsement has been, like lights out. I mean, it’s just been incredible. The energy is real.”
An internal poll from Fry’s campaign shows Rice trails the Trump-endorsed candidate by double digits in their primary race.
Russell Fry leads Tom Rice in South Carolina CD 7 GOP Primary. Tom Rice was one of the 10 Republicans Who Voted To Impeach President Trump
Ryan meanwhile, has also hitched his wagon to another struggling horse in Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney.
Cheney is also one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, and one who has made it a personal crusade to embellish the events at the Capitol over a year ago.
The Political Insider reported in September that Ryan had been donating money and support to Cheney’s re-election bid in the hopes that he could help in “exciting her own voters.”
Cheney, like Rice according to a new poll, is struggling, which is pretty exciting. She trails her primary opponent, Harriet Hageman, a Wyoming attorney who has the backing of Trump, by a whopping 30 percentage points.
NEW: A @club4growth poll of #WYAL shows Rep Liz Cheney (R) down 30 points to the Trump-backed Harriet Hageman (R) in the Aug 16 primary
Trump has referred to Ryan as a “curse to the Republican Party” after the former Speaker advised the GOP to steer clear of the “populist appeal of one personality.”
Paul Ryan also overdramatized the events of January 6th and Trump’s role, saying he found it “horrifying to see a presidency come to such a dishonorable and disgraceful end.”
“He has no clue as to what needs to be done for our Country, was a weak and ineffective leader, and spends all of his time fighting Republicans as opposed to Democrats who are destroying our Country,” Trump fired back.
The former President has said Tom Rice is a “coward who abandoned his constituents by caving to Nancy Pelosi and the Radical Left.”
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