It’s been just over one month since pro-Trump insurgents rioted at the U.S. Capitol, creating both physical and emotional damages. Many who survived the riots have spoken out about their personal experiences, including, as Daily Kos covered, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has done two live videos detailing her trauma. For those of us who followed the insurgency from home, we know that after a group of countless white people invaded the Capitol, custodial workers—including many people of color—were left to clean their mess.
Massachusetts Rep. Ayanna Pressley spoke to CNN host Jake Tapper about just that subject on Sunday morning, appearing on State of the Union. Her response is smart, moving, and emotional, and absolutely worth a watch. Let’s delve into it below.
Tapper referenced the one-month anniversary of the insurgency, as well as Donald Trump’s impeachment trial beginning this coming Tuesday. “You lived through the events of January sixth,” Tapper stated. “What do you say to people who say, ‘Come on, just move on’?”
“If we really believe that this is a moment of reckoning in every way, then we must act accordingly,” Pressley replied. “And that means that Donald J. Trump must be held accountable because he is culpable for having incited this insurrection by perpetuating this big lie. This House has twice done its job. He will forever be the twice impeached president by this Democratic-majority led House.
Now, the Senate must honor their oath and impeach Donald J. Trump to hold him accountable,” Pressley continued. “But also, to bar him from running for public office ever again. And then, we know that he had accomplices. Who told on themselves. In broad daylight. They aided and abetted this insurrection by perpetuating this big lie. And they must be expelled. And then we must continue to investigate, Jake, so that any individuals or agencies that enabled this insurrection are taken to account.
But let me just say this, for those that continue to feign great surprise about what happened on January 6th. As a Black woman, to be barricaded in my office, using office furniture and water bottles… On the ground, in the dark. That terror, those moments of terror, is familiar in a deep and ancestral way for me. And, I want us to do everything to ensure that a breach like this never occurs at the Capitol. But I want us to address the evil incurred that is white supremacy in this nation. This is not only about securing the Capitol to ensure that members, and our staffs, and custodial staff, and food services workers, are safe in the Capitol… It is that we are safe in America.
One of the images that I am haunted by,” Pressley continued, “is the Black custodial staff cleaning up the mess left by that violent white supremacist mob. That is a metaphor for America. We have been cleaning up after violent white supremacist mobs for generations. And it must end. So, impeach, expel, investigate.”
Tapper mentioned that some Congresspeople have expressed fear for their safety following the insurgency, and noted that they are not sharing Pressley’s location during the interview because of her “significant” security concerns and that many House colleagues blame rhetoric coming from some House Republicans. Surprising no one, Tapper mentioned Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
“Simply put,” he asked. “Do you feel safe going to work?”
“Look, I feel safe,” Pressley said. “Living with threats and living with bigots, who are as vile in their rhetoric as they are in the policies that they seek and enact, and the harm that they seek to cause the most marginalized communities, Black Americans in particular, is not new. Again, this is familiar in an ancestral sort of way. So, it is not going to deter or obstruct me from doing my job for the American people.” Then Pressley discussed the importance of a COVID-19 response that leaves no one behind.
Here’s that clip.
“One of the images that I’m haunted by is the black custodial staff cleaning up the mess left by that violent white supremacist mob. That is a metaphor for America.” Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley discusses the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol and impeachment. #CNNSOTUpic.twitter.com/t2i5su99Gj
On a related note, New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim tweeted about his personal experience cleaning up after the riots. The thread is quickly going viral and is well worth checking out, too.
It was a month ago when I found this broken eagle while cleaning the Capitol after the insurrection. I kept it as a tender reminder of the enormous work ahead to heal. This is one of several symbols I want to share with you as we think what comes next for our nation (THREAD) pic.twitter.com/u4SRgA8lxX
Donald Trump has been impeached for his role in using lies and incendiary language, over a period of months, to subvert the 2020 election, obstruct the business of the nation, and “gravely endanger the security of the United States and its institutions.” Those articles of impeachment have been forwarded to the Senate, along with supporting documents, to show that Donald J. Trump is uniquely responsible for the Jan. 6 assault on the United States Capitol, and that his behavior on that day “was not an isolated event.”
Unsurprisingly, House impeachment managers intend to focus on exactly these issues: Trump’s words, actions, and inactions as they relate to violence on Jan. 6. That includes how Trump encouraged the presences of white nationalist militias, lied repeatedly about the outcome of the election in ways meant to inflame his supporters, drove the whole mass toward the Capitol, and stood aside in pleasure as insurgents swarmed the halls of Congress.
Just as expected is the response from Trump’s legal team and from Republicans in the Senate. Because they want to Trump’s second impeachment trial to be about anything other than the subject of his impeachment.
What Republicans would enjoy most, would be to spend the entire trial arguing technical points about 19th century cases to prove that Trump can’t be tried now that he’s out of office. Two or three days of debating the impeachment of Judge Mark Delahay (who resigned in 1873 in an effort to avoid being impeached for repeatedly showing up in court drunk) or Secretary of War William Belknap (resigned in 1876 to get ahead of an impeachment for selling a government appointment) would suit them right down to the ground. Republicans would sincerely love to spend a few days putting America to sleep with the inside story of the Grant administration.
That tactic has already been on display in the vote forced by Sen. Rand Paul, in which all but five Republicans voted to just skip the entire trial. It also forms three-quarters of the response to the House impeachment from Donald Trump’s legal team, which would clearly love to spend their time talking about What Would Jefferson Do?
That’s because, as Politico reports, talking about the actual events of Jan. 6, and Donald Trump’s actions that led to men in paramilitary garb searching through the House chamber for hostages could be deeply embarrassing to Republicans. As eternal Trump advisor Steve Bannon notes, “The Democrats have a very emotional and compelling case. They’re going to try to convict him in the eyes of the American people and smear him forever.”
Yes. Because showing Trump’s words next to the results is “very emotional and compelling.” And there’s absolutely no doubt that the House impeachment managers will be pitching their case directly to the public, perhaps even more than to the senators seated in the chamber. After all, barring the discovery of Donald Trump’s fingerprints on the pipe bomb left outside the RNC, it’s highly unlikely that 17 Republican senators will suddenly recover their morality. The best thing that the House team might be able to do, in the sense of preventing Trump from continuing to be a source of divisiveness and damage for the nation, is to give the public a powerful reminder of just how Trump created the insurgency.
That’s why House impeachment managers are working to assemble a video presentation that will put together words and events on Jan. 6. Rather than working with producers who have done documentaries or political ads, the team has been reportedly working with producers of videos used at criminal trials.
As The Washington Post reports, exactly how the trial will play out remains unclear. In Trump’s first impeachment, Republican control of the Senate allowed Mitch McConnell to define most of the proceedings, that included holding a vote to cut off the possibility of hearing from any witnesses. But Sen. Chuck Schumer is not bound by any of those past decisions. House impeachment managers could well choose to call witnesses, in spite of various “threats” from Republicans that calling any witnesses could lead to a drawn-out proceeding. A drawn-out proceeding that keeps hammering at Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy doesn’t seem like something that should concern Democrats.
And, as much as Trump’s attorney’s would love to keep the Senate buried in old citations and out of context statements from the constitutional convention, their own response opens the door to exactly the kind of pounding that Senate Republicans don’t want to see—one in which every one of Donald Trump’s false statements about the election gets hauled out for review. That’s because the response to the House managers included a statement from Trump saying that not only could no one prove he had lied, but he claimed to have won the election.
When it comes to the case that the impeachment managers would like to make, Law & Crime details exactly the points they need to hit to make their case. Key among the things that the managers need to emphasize is this point from the articles of impeachment: “[Trump’s] belief that he won the election—regardless of its truth or falsity (though it is assuredly false)—is no defense at all for his abuse of office.”
It doesn’t matter if Trump believes his own lies. That doesn’t excuse his actions in undercutting American institutions or encouraging violent action. Trump can be as upset by his defeat as he likes—many other election losers were also upset. But whether it was Andrew Jackson or Al Gore, “all of these Presidential candidates accepted the election results and acquiesced to the peaceful transfer of power required by the Constitution.”
Trump’s situation is unique. And his despicable actions deserve to be uniquely punished. If the Senate Republicans have already stopped their ears to the truth, that case will be made to the public.
If Republicans are embarrassed, it’s because they should be.
More than 350 congressional staff members signed an open letter Wednesday to the Senate, urging legislators to convict former President Donald Trump for inciting an attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. “As Congressional employees, we don’t have a vote on whether to convict Donald J. Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack at the Capitol, but our Senators do,” the staffers said in the letter. “And for our sake, and the sake of the country, we ask that they vote to convict the former president and bar him from ever holding office again.” Trump called for his supporters to march to the Capitol to block Congress from certifying President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory last month. “We will never give up,” he said at a Save America rally in Washington, D.C. “We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about.”
With those words, he effectively ended a 230-year tradition of peaceful transitions of power, the congressional staffers pointed out. “Six people died. A Capitol Police officer—one of our co-workers who guards and greets us every day—was beaten to death,” they said. “The attack on our workplace was inspired by lies told by the former president and others about the results of the election in a baseless, months-long effort to reject votes lawfully cast by the American people.”
Those who signed the letter represent more than 100 offices from the House, 15 from the Senate, and 10 committees, CNN reported. "No one should have to experience something like this in their place of work," an unnamed staff member told CNN before the letter was released. "And I think it's important to tell this part of the story, because it's not just members of Congress who come to work at the Capitol every day. And it's not just staffers who work at the Capitol who were traumatized by what happened. And I think that is a piece of it.
“The trauma is there; the trauma is very real. And anytime that new pieces of information come out, you know, you're kind of re-traumatized.”
Read the workers’ complete letter below:
“We are staff who work for members of the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives, where it is our honor and privilege to serve our country and our fellow Americans. We write this letter to share our own views and experiences, not the views of our employers. But on January 6, 2021, our workplace was attacked by a violent mob trying to stop the electoral college vote count. That mob was incited by former president Donald J. Trump and his political allies, some of whom we pass every day in the hallways at work.
Many of us attended school in the post-Columbine era and were trained to respond to active shooter situations in our classrooms. As the mob smashed through Capitol Police barricades, broke doors and windows, and charged into the Capitol with body armor and weapons, many of us hid behind chairs and under desks or barricaded ourselves in offices. Others watched on TV and frantically tried to reach bosses and colleagues as they fled for their lives.
On January 6, the former President broke America’s 230-year legacy of the peaceful transition of power when he incited a mob to disrupt the counting of electoral college votes. Six people died. A Capitol Police officer—one of our co-workers who guards and greets us every day—was beaten to death. The attack on our workplace was inspired by lies told by the former president and others about the results of the election in a baseless, months-long effort to reject votes lawfully cast by the American people.
Our Constitution only works when we believe in it and defend it. It’s a shared commitment to equal justice, the rule of law, and the peaceful resolution of our differences. Any person who doesn’t share these beliefs has no place representing the American people, now or in the future. The use of violence and lies to overturn an election is not worthy of debate. Either you stand with the republic or against it.
As Congressional employees, we don’t have a vote on whether to convict Donald J. Trump for his role in inciting the violent attack at the Capitol, but our Senators do. And for our sake, and the sake of the country, we ask that they vote to convict the former president and bar him from ever holding office again.”
Ever since Democrats began talking of impeaching Donald Trump for the second time, Republicans in the Senate have been sweating the idea of having to actually confront witnesses. In the first trial, where Mitch McConnell had control over everything that happened, Republicans were happy to just vote away the possibility of any witnesses being called. In this second round, they don’t have that option. So instead their only play has been making threats. If Democrats call a single witness, the Republicans will call the FBI to testify about how the insurgency was planned in advance. If Democrats call a single witness, Republicans will something something Kamala Harris.
There are a number of reasons why these threats are laughable. First, calling the FBI to talk about the pre-planning that went into the assault on the Capitol would only reinforce how Trump radicalized his base. Second, Republicans don’t get to call anyone—it’s Trump’s legal team that gets to request witnesses, and nothing at all says they will play along with a scheme that could hurt their client. Third, the threat is coming from Lindsey Graham and that’s always laughable.
And now it seems that lead impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin has already asked a witness to appear in the Senate trial. He’s issued an invite to one … Donald J. Trump.
Raskin’s letter gets started quickly by pointing out that Trump has already been impeached (for a second time), is about to be tried in the Senate (for a second time), and has sent a response to the House impeachment managers. Wisely, Raskin just skips right back the first three fourths of that response—which is the part where Trump’s attorney’s attempt to make a case that an impeachment trial after the end of a term is unconstitutional—and gets right down to the one part of the reply that Trump clearly dictated himself. The part where Trump denies that he ever lied and claims no one can actually say for sure that he didn’t win.
Two days ago, you filed an Answer in which you denied many factual allegations set forth in the articles of impeachment. You have thus attempted to put critical facts at issue notwithstanding the clear and overwhelming evidence of your constitutional offence. In light of your disputing these factual allegations, I write to invite you to provide testimony under oath, either before or during the Senate impeachment trial, concerning your conduct on Jan. 6, 2021.
Raskin goes on to point out that both Gerald Ford and Bill Clinton provided testimony under oath while they were still in office. And, for an extra tweak of Trump’s bronzer-coated nose, Raskin adds “whereas a sitting president might raise concerns about distraction from their official duties, that concern is clearly inapplicable here.” In other words, since you’re not doing anything anyway ...
It would be easy to read the entire letter as an extended joke. After all, Trump’s legal team will surely make it clear to him that sitting down to defend his actions on January 6 would be a bad thing. That would be a day when Trump started out partying down while Rudy Giuliani was calling for “trial by combat,” took the stage to once again tell his followers that the election was being stolen and that he would march with them to the Capitol, returned to the White House to wonder why no one else was getting excited about the insurgency, failed to respond to requests for military assistance, and stepped out to tell the terrorists occupying the Capitol that “we love you” and “you’re very special.” Trump raising his hand to testify would be an abysmally misguided idea.
On the other hand, like everyone else, Raskin knows Donald Trump way too well at this point. Throwing down the gauntlet like this, complete with a few obvious digs, is exactly the kind of thing that could make Trump angry and his legal team terrified.
If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on Jan. 6, 2021
In other words: If you’re too big a chicken to show up, we’ll know you’re a liar.
The odds against Trump taking up the challenge are astronomically high. But Raskin deserves a round of applause for throwing this out there. The proposal here is exactly the kind of ploy that a third-rate third-grade bully like Trump would understand in only one way—Democrats are calling him a coward and a liar.
That’s unlikely to lever his rear into a witness chair. But who knows, it might.
“We are in receipt of your latest public relations stunt,” write Bruce Castor and David Schoen. Then they delightfully state both that there can’t be a negative inference in the trial, and that the trial is unconstitutional before finishing up with “this use of our Constitution to bring a purported impeachment proceeding is much too serious to play these games.”
What they don’t say is whether or not Trump has seen the letter.
Republicans want to frame Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial as if it’s all about the speech he made at the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6. It’s not. The impeachment is over the incitement to violence and insurrection created by Trump over the whole span from the election to the assault on the Capitol. That includes Trump sending tweets such as “This Fake Election can no longer stand” and, of course, “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
However, so long as Republicans are focusing on the events of that one morning, it’s worth taking a second look at that rally and the one that came before on the evening of Jan. 5. While the words of Trump’s closing speech—complete with repeated demands that his followers march to the Capitol—are the most obvious subject of the impeachment, he was far from alone. Speakers at those two rallies included Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani, Eric Trump, and Donald Trump Jr. All of them did their share in both raising the temperature of the crowd and encouraging violent actions.
But there was one other event at that rally that both sums up what Trump’s movement is all about, and contributed to driving insurgents into the halls of Congress. It was a film. One in which every frame is a cast study in delivering violent, anti-Semitic propaganda.
There’s no doubt that every speaker on the agenda added to the dark energy that resulted in the deadly insurgency. In fact, as The Washington Post reports, one of the speakers at the Jan. 5 rally was actually among those who bashed their way into the Capitol the following day. Brandon Straka—a white guy who founded the “walk away” campaign that encouraged Black voters to leave the Democratic Party—described Jan. 6 as “the revolution” in his speech to the gathered Trump supporters, and encouraged them to “fight back” as “patriots.” Straka, who frequently appears on Fox News as “a former liberal,” assaulted a police officer, called on others to do the same, then broke into the Capitol. He’s now facing multiple felony charges.
That same evening Roger Stone spoke while being flanked by “guards” from the Oath Keepers. As Mother Jonesnoted, Stone has a long-standing relationship with terrorist group the Proud Boys. On Jan. 5, Stone was there to tell Trump supporters to “fight until the bitter end” to block Joe Biden’s victory. Stone described the following day as the central moment of an “epic struggle.”
Michael Flynn described Jan. 6 as “a crucible moment in United States history.” While his word choice was suspect, his message to the gathered mob was clear. “We should not accept this,” said Flynn. “Some of these states had more dead voters than the battlefields of Gettysburg or the battlefields of Vicksburg or the battlefields of Normandy. … We did not have a free, fair, and transparent vote on the third of November. And the entire world knows, everyone in this country knows, who won the election on the third.” And Flynn finished by explicitly telling the crowd what was expected of them. “The members of Congress, the members of the House of Representatives, the members of the United States Senate … those of you who are feeling weak tonight; those of you who don’t have the moral fiber in your bodies, get some tonight. Because tomorrow we the people are going to be here, and we want you to know that we will not stand for a lie.” On the heels of Flynn’s speech, former Trump adviser George Papadopoulos stepped up to make it clear that Trump’s supporters would not forget the “traitors” who voted to count the electoral votes.
Before Trump spoke on Jan. 6, Rudy Giuliani took the stage and spun a completely fantastic tale in which halting the day’s count of electoral votes would somehow generate a 10-day period in which everything about the election could be reviewed. There’s nothing in the Constitution or later law that even hints at such an event, and Giuliani was speaking after 63 days and 62 lawsuits had failed to uncover any of the evidence of fraud he assured the crowd was present. Still, “Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked,” said Giuliani, “the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat.”
Donald Trump’s sons also appeared that morning, and their speeches—particularly that of Donald Trump Jr.—did have one especially notable quality. As Politico reported, Junior’s speech was so laced with expletives that Fox News, which had been covering the event live, was forced to cut away. But as Trump’s eldest son warned Republicans that they better vote the way his father wanted spoke, he did make one clear statement between all the four letter words. “This gathering should send a message to them,” said Trump Jr. “This isn’t their Republican Party anymore! This is Donald Trump's Republican Party!” Oh, and Eric also spoke. “We will never, ever, ever stop fighting,” said Eric.
But for all those speakers, it was a film that both set the mood of the day and serves as the best defining document of Trump and Trumpism. Just Security has done a breakdown of the imagery involved in this brief film, and the message of fascism shines through. Not just the kind of authoritarianism that everyone casually assigns to Trump as if that’s just peachy, but genuine shiny-boot and red armband fascism, complete with enough tropes of Übermensch and Untermensch to make Leni Riefenstahl jealous.
As Just Security’s analysis makes clear, the video follows a long tradition of fascist framing. That doesn’t just mean presenting Trump as a heroic figure whose powerful presence causes others to swoon, or contrasting a false paradise under Trump with an equally false wasteland without him. It also explicitly involves using images to remind supporters what Trump stands for: white nationalism.
Everything about the video is designed to help viewers see a through line that connects what’s happening in the Capitol to an elite group of Jews secretly, and not so secretly, guiding America toward a state where white Christians are under siege. The scope of the threat is expanded to include an international conspiracy that includes the U.N. and E.U. who, with Jewish-controlled Hollywood, are seeking to weaken powerful white America.
The video shifts to an image of Senator Charles Schumer, reminding the viewer of prominent Jewish leaders of the Democratic party. Schumer is wearing a Kente cloth, an image evocative of Ku Klux Klan ideology — that Jews support Black liberation movements as a way to undermine white rule and destroy the nation. The next frame shows the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, flanked by two Jewish Congressman, Representatives Nadler and Schiff. Pelosi, too, is controlled by Jews.
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy may have had a sudden memory lapse when it comes to understanding QAnon and the intrinsically anti-Semitic ideology at its core. Trump’s video team did not forget. They’ve created a video that is practically a look into Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s hate-filled mind.
This video was sequenced right after Rudy Giuliani told Trump’s supporters that he wanted “trial by combat” and right before Trump himself stepped up to call on his followers to march to the Capitol. What those people who murdered a police officer, trampled over a woman, injured hundreds, smashed open the doors of the Capitol, raised a gallows, and went hunting for congressional hostages received wasn’t just limited to Trump’s statements on the morning of Jan. 6. What drove them there was what Trump, his surrogates, the right-wing media, and Republicans in both the House and Senate did after—and before—the election.
They created a world where people don’t just believe the propaganda of the video above, they’re willing to act on it.
As Donald Trump’s second impeachment approaches, Lindsey Graham has made a series of extremely odd threats. On Tuesday, he suggested that should Democrats call a single witness, Republicans would call in the FBI to give a full accounting of how white supremacist groups had planned for weeks to carry out violent acts on Jan. 6. The reason that Graham thinks that this is a threat which should concern Democrats is because Fox News and other right-wing sources have been working hard to convince their viewers that the entire impeachment is just about things Trump said at the “Stop the Steal” rally just before the assault on the Capitol. So if anyone was doing pre-planning for the insurrection, that lets Trump off the hook. Except that’s not at all what the impeachment documents actually say.
It’s not clear if someone actually made that point to Graham, but when he was questioned about the impeachment on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s most loyal senator was ready to voice an even more obscure response—one that involves a long-running, and racist, Republican lie. If Democrats call even a single witness to discuss events on Jan. 6, Graham promised that Republicans would turn the table and … use the impeachment trial to attack Vice President Kamala Harris.
How would anything happening on Jan. 6 relate badly on the vice president? It wouldn’t. But the statements, which Graham made—where else?—while speaking with Sean Hannity on Fox News don’t actually have anything to do with the assault on the Capitol or Trump’s impeachment. As Yahoo News makes clear, Graham is really speaking to an existing Republican theme claiming that Democrats have encouraged violence by Black Lives Matter protesters.
"If you're going to pursue this, and you wanna start calling witnesses, and you want to drag this thing out, it would be fair to have Kamala Harris' tape play where she bailed people out of jail,” said Graham. “What more could you do to incite future violence, than to pay the bail of the people who broke up the shops and beat up the cops. How's that not inciting future violence? Be careful what you wish for my Democratic colleagues, be careful what you wish for."
The thing about the “Kamala Harris’ tape” is that it would be very difficult to play. Because there is no tape. Instead, there appears to be nothing behind this by a single tweet from Harris in which she encouraged contributions to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which helps to address inequities in America’s often crushing cash bail system. Harris’ tweet was made on June 1, placing it less than a week after Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis Police, and at a time when over a hundred nonviolent protesters had been arrested.
The claim that Harris was encouraging violence became a recurring theme on the right. In August, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton tweeted that Harris “helped violent rioters in Minnesota get out of jail to do more damage.” Donald Trump recycled that information the next day, except that Trump—as he does so often—expanded on the lie to make it not just about Harris, but “thirteen members of Biden’s campaign staff” as well as “his running mate, Kamala” bailing “rioters” and “looters” out of jail.
Now, almost six months later, Graham is reviving this claim against Harris as if it represents some sort of defense of Trump. It’s a mirror of how Republicans have been reacting to criticism of QAnon Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene by waggling fingers at Rep. Ilhan Omar. In both cases, Republicans are trying to equate racism, anti-Semitism, and white supremacist violence with Black Americans asking for justice.
As The Washington Post pointed out back in September, this whole line of attack isn’t just racist, it’s also simply wrong. Of the 170 arrested in connection with the protests between Floyd’s murder and the date of Harris’ tweet, 167 were released without bail or with only a small fee. About a third were arrested without charges. Minnesota Freedom Fund definitely benefited from the attention, and their contributions went way up. But it seems that none of the money actually went to bail out anyone charged with either rioting or looting. Some of the money collected did later go toward people charged with serious crimes, even murder. But that’s an indictment of the cash bail system, and the massive inequality it generates in the justice system. It’s not a mark against Kamala Harris.
In any case, what Graham is proposing is the kind of testimony that would not be allowed in any court. It’s pointing a false finger of blame at someone else in a completely different situation. It’s a third grade idea of justice where “she did it too” is supposed to be an excuse for doing something wrong.
On top of all that, Graham’s finger pointing at Harris is deeply racist. Not only is it built on false racist claims about protesters in Minnesota, it’s absolutely no coincidence that Graham was signaling toward Harris and not other people who have been vocal about the need to abolish the cash bail system—including President Biden.
Unable to defend Greene, Republicans have resorted to attacking Omar or Maxine Waters, as Republican leader Kevin McCarthy did in his statement on Tuesday evening. Unable to defend Trump, Graham instead lodged a completely false claim at Kamala Harris.
On Tuesday, Donald Trump’s legal team made their official response to the article of impeachment delivered by House impeachment managers. Though it might easily have been misdirected since that response is actually written to the “Unites States Senate.” This follows earlier filings by Trump’s legal team to the “United States Districct Court,” the “Northern Distrcoit of Georgia,” and the “Eastern Distrct of Michigan.”
But while the opening words of Trump’s reply may generate a chuckle or an eye roll, it’s really the last section of that response that’s the most laughable. And the most infuriating. Because after providing three replies in which the argument focuses on the question of whether it is considered constitutional to impeach an executive once they’re out of office, the last answer that Trump provides goes directly back to square one by claiming that he never did anything wrong in the first place and that: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th president’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies that they were false.”
That’s right. A month after he drove a mob into a murderous rage, Trump isn’t just denying he incited their assault on the Capitol. He’s denying he lied.
In the early hours of Nov. 4, as it was becoming clear to everyone that Joe Biden was going to collect far more than the 270 electoral votes necessary to secure victory, Trump stepped in front of the cameras to complain. In that appearance, Trump said: “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.”
That’s a lie. Had Trump constrained himself to no more than such generalized statements, he might still have generated a sense of righteous anger and disappointment among his supporters, but it’s unlikely that would have created the kind rage that led to Jan. 6. However, Trump didn’t hold himself to the just a generic claim of victory.
By Nov. 7, shortly after the Associated Press called the election for Biden, Trump was back on the air to make a statement that leveled the first of many specific charges. “The Biden campaign ... wants ballots counted even if they are fraudulent, manufactured, or cast by ineligible or deceased voters.” All of those charges would persist right up until Jan. 6, with Trump’s team eventually assigning numbers to each category—8,000 dead voters, 14,000 out-of-state voters, 10,000 late ballots—without ever explaining where they obtained these values.
Over the course of the following months, Trump added more specific charges. He claimed that there were fraudulent drop boxes in Wisconsin. That votes of Arizona Republicans had been thrown out. That boxes full of votes had been smuggled into Philadelphia.
Trump was still making both his general claims and these very specific charges right up to the final “Stop the Steal” speech on the morning of Jan. 6. “... this year they rigged an election, they rigged it like they have never rigged an election before, and by the way, last night, they didn't do a bad job either, if you notice ... We will stop the steal! ... We won it by a landslide. This was no close election. ... There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Now think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters ... So in Pennsylvania, you had 205,000 more votes than you had voters, and it’s — the number is actually much greater than that now ... In Wisconsin, corrupt Democrat-run cities deployed more than 500 illegal unmanned, unsecured drop boxes, which collected a minimum of 91,000 unlawful votes. ... They have these lockboxes. And you know, they pick them up and they disappear for two days. People would say where’s that box? They’d disappeared. Nobody even knew where the hell it was. In addition, more than 170,000 absentee votes were counted in Wisconsin without a valid absentee ballot application. So they had a vote, but they had no application and that’s illegal in Wisconsin. Meaning, those votes were blatantly done in opposition to state law and they came 100 percent from Democrat areas such as Milwaukee and Madison. 100 percent.”
Would a “reasonable jurist” know these statements were lies? Of course they would. That’s easy to see since every single time these arguments went before a judge they were uniformly rejected. Not all of the Trump team’s 62 lawsuits came down to statements of fact. Some were tossed with statements that explicitly called out the lack of any real evidence behind Trump’s claims.
“One might expect that when seeking such a startling outcome, a plaintiff would come formidably armed with compelling legal arguments and factual proof of rampant corruption. That has not happened.” — U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Brann
There were months in which Trump’s team might have fleshed out their claims. Months in which they might have explained the source of all those numbers. They didn’t do that. Instead they added claims about a dead Venezuelan dictator and servers hidden in Germany. Dominion Voting Systems is suing Rudy Giuliani for $1.3 billion for running a “viral disinformation campaign.” Trump repeated all those same allegations in his rallies, right up to the end.
When Trump’s attorneys claim that a “rational jurist” could not know that Trump’s claims are false, what they actually mean is an ignorant jurist. Someone who had been subjected to all these false claims and allowed to view none of the actual information. Like a Fox News viewer. Because a rational, informed juror would definitely be able to tell that Trump’s statements were not just lies, but lies created expressly for the purpose of generating confusion over facts that are otherwise very cut and dry.
But what be most surprising is that Trump isn’t just saying that someone making these statements might have been believed before Jan. 6, he’s still refusing to admit that they are false. This explicit inclusion in his reply makes everything Trump has said before and after Jan. 6 fair game. House impeachment managers should be much happier about that than Trump’s legal team.
Though it may seem as if bad lawyers are an infinite commodity, Donald Trump has spent years testing that theory. Trump’s line of personal attorneys have had a tendency to head off on “extended vacations,” often while handing authorities information that creates a challenge for Trump’s next attorney. In the process of contesting the election alone, Trump sifted the nation to come up with a legal team that was eventually headed by Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell after such legal powerhouses as Corey Lewandowski and Pam Bondi had fallen by the wayside.
The problem with being a Trump attorney isn’t just being forced to defend indefensible positions; it’s having to do so in the way that pleases Trump. That sometimes means not staging a defense in the way what’s most likely to lead to acquittal, and instead doubling down on why Trump was perfectly entitled to commit a crime in the first place. And did it perfectly.
In the case of Trump’s second impeachment, Trump is running through whole sets of attorneys, and he still doesn’t seem to have found one who will do what he wants: use the impeachment trial as another opportunity to encourage violence.
Shortly after the impeachment in the House, Bloomberg reported that Trump was “struggling” to find a team of lawyers to manage his defense before the Senate. Trump’s entire first impeachment defense team, including Jay Sekulow and former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, turned down the opportunity for a repeat performance. Even the time limit on Trump’s long-running arrangement with Pam Bondi seems to have expired; she also opted out.
Potential attorneys are likely to be feeling better these days, now that Senate Republicans have made it clear that when they gave Trump a free pass the first time, they really meant it. With 45 Republicans voting that it’s pointless to move forward with the impeachment, and Republicans threatening to drag the Senate into a months-long recounting of post-election events if a single witness is called, it seems as if the legal team of Nobody, Absent, and Nothing could stage an adequate defense.
The problem is that Trump isn’t happy to just sit there, collect another free pass, and move on. Instead, Trump has been insisting to his attorneys that he wants to use the impeachment trial to put on “evidence” of supposed election fraud.
In other words: Trump wants to use his impeachment trial not to defend himself against charges of inciting a murderous, seditious mob, but to explain why that mob was in the right when it smashed into the Capitol on a hunt for hostages.
That insistence is part of what has made it so difficult for Trump to secure a legal crew. Trump got so upset over the reluctance of his legal team to join in the sedition attempt that he parted ways with five members of his legal team last week. However, The New York Timesdid show Trump picking up two new attorneys to head his impeachment team: former Pennsylvania District Attorney Bruce Castor, and David Schoen. Schoen was most recently in the public eye as the lead attorney for Roger Stone in his defense against multiple charges related to the Mueller investigation. That would be Stone’s losing case, requiring Trump to get out his pardon pen.
But, as the Times is now reporting, just because Trump has new attorneys doesn’t mean that those attorneys are going to follow him off a cliff. Instead the team is arguing that they should conduct his defense on the lines that the trial itself is unconstitutional.
This claim is also false, but it has serious advantages in getting the results Trump, his legal team, and Senate Republicans want. First, it prevents Republicans from having to conduct a trial on whether Trump engaged in incitement while Trump is actively engaged in more incitement. Second, it lets the Republicans lean back into technical arguments they’ve already made about the legality of impeachment post-term. It’s an argument that lets Republicans vote to acquit Trump while still maintaining that they’re just darn horrified about the insurgency thing.
Which is, of course, the whole reason that Republicans launched the claim that impeaching Trump after they purposely allowed the clock to run out is unconstitutional. It’s certainly not because any of them feel there’s a real constitutional issue, and they know their position breaks with past Senate precedent. It’s a position designed to let them have it both ways: They can claim to be against what Trump did without ever going on record against Trump.
And the only thing that could get in their way … is Trump.
It’s becoming much clearer why Republicans in Congress are so reluctant to acknowledge factual reality—such as the reality that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election fairly, or that Donald Trump incited a mob that attacked Congress and ransacked the U.S. Capitol—and have doubled down on their embrace of anti-democratic disinformation that fueled the insurrection. If the Republicans dare admit any of it is real, they risk the insane wrath of the millions of GOP voters out there who have wholly swallowed all that false Trumpian propaganda.
That’s become especially self-evident among Republicans at the state and local levels throughout the country in the weeks since the Jan. 6 riot. As Hunter recently explained, the GOP at the ground level not only has fully embraced the conspiracist rot that Trump promoted after he lost, but it also has become even more openly extreme than it was before the election. Liz Cheney is now finding that out.
Whenever Republicans have made any gestures toward acknowledging either Biden’s win or Trump’s seditionist behavior, asTheGuardianrecently reported, voters at the state and local level have responded with outrage and threats.
“The evidence is overwhelming that local parties across the country, in blue states and red states, are radicalized and support extremely far outside the mainstream positions like, for example, ending our democratic experiment to install Donald Trump as president over the will of the people,” Tim Miller, former political director of Republican Voters Against Trump, told The Guardian.
“They believe in insane COVID denialism and QAnon and all these other conspiracies. It’s endemic, not just a couple of state parties. It’s the vast majority of state parties throughout the country.”
The list is long and worrisome:
Arizona: The state Republican Party reelected Kelli Ward last weekend. She’s a conspiracy-theory-promoting “Trump Republican” who unabashedly promoted the “election fraud” disinformation. Party officials also voted to censure Gov. Doug Ducey for certifying Trump’s loss in Arizona, along with Cindy McCain, the widow of Sen. John McCain, and former Sen. Jeff Flake, both for having supported Biden in the election.
Texas: The state Republican Party encouraged its members to follow them on Gab, the favorite social media platform of white nationalists, with a pro-QAnon conspiracy trope: “We Are the Storm.” Even after Biden’s inauguration, the party insisted that he had won fraudulently: “It took a global pandemic, a thoroughly corrupt media, and massive election irregularities for President Trump to be removed from office," the GOP said in a statement on its website.
Hawaii: The Hawaii Republican Party’s official account published a thread of tweets sympathizing with supporters of QAnon—dismissing the cult’s conspiracy theories that Democrats and media figures are secretly operating as global pedophilia ring, but arguing that adherents nonetheless were engaged in a form of patriotism. The same account also praised the “generally high quality” work of a Holocaust-denying YouTuber named Tarl Warwick, saying: “It is good to periodically step outside the ‘bubble’ of corporate commentators for additional perspective.” The party deleted and condemned the tweets; the communications official who posted them has resigned.
Oregon: The state’s Republican Party issued a lengthy statement stuffed full of conspiracy theories and disinformation condemning the 10 Republican members of Congress who voted to impeach Trump after the insurrection. It claimed “there is growing evidence that the violence at the Capitol was a ‘false flag’ operation designed to discredit President Trump and his supporters.” Some 23 Republican members of the state House repudiated the statement, noting that “there is no credible evidence to support false flag claims,” adding that such rumormongering had become a distraction.
Wyoming: State activists opened a campaign to “recall” Congressman Liz Cheney after she joined the Republicans voting to impeach Trump, and they have collected over 55,000 signatures. Ten county-level parties in the state voted to censure Cheney. A state senator named Anthony Bouchard announced a 2022 campaign against the congresswoman. The Wyoming Republican state party said "there has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received."
Matt Gaetz of Florida campaigns against his fellow Republican Congressman Liz Cheney in Wyoming.
Pro-Trump Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida even traveled to Wyoming to lead a rally attacking Cheney. "We are in a battle for the soul of the Republican party, and I intend to win it,” Gaetz told the rally.
The sentiments in Wyoming were deep and widespread. A Gillette woman named Shelley Horn started the Cheney recall petition, and told CNN: “You just can't go, 'Oh well, I need to vote with my conscience.' No! Vote for what your people put you in there to do. You're a Republican, you're supposed to back your party regardless.”
Trump supporter Taylor Haynes told CNN, "In my view, she's done in Wyoming." A poll commissioned by the Trump political operation purportedly showed the impeachment vote had hurt her popularity. “Liz Cheney's favorables there are only slightly worse than her father's shooting skills,” quipped Donald Trump Jr.
Other polls, however, supported the claim. A Jan. 27 McLaughlin poll that showed 70% of Wyoming voters believe the impeachment trial was unconstitutional; more than two-thirds disapprove of Cheney’s vote, and 63% say they are unlikely to vote for Cheney again.
Some longtime GOP figures defended her. Gale Geringer, a veteran Republican strategist, told CNN that Cheney showed "courage" in casting the Trump impeachment vote: "I don't underestimate the anger people are feeling right now. It's huge. And Liz Cheney has become the target of that anger, but I don't think she's really the cause of it. I think it's fear of what the Biden administration is going to do to Wyoming. We're petrified. Our entire economy, all of our jobs, our tax base has been threatened. And there's nothing we can do about Joe Biden for four years. But we can take that fear and anger out on Liz Cheney."
But Politico reporter Tara Palmieri tagged along with the CNN crew, and found it nearly impossible to find anyone in the state who wasn’t angry with their congresswoman. Her impression was that Cheney is in serious political trouble.
Honestly, it was hard to find anyone who would defend Cheney — and I really tried to talk to as many people as I could not at the rally. I stopped at a biker bar, a gun shop, a vape shop, a hardware store, a steakhouse, a diner, a dentist’s office and a pawn shop …
— At Harbor Freight Tools, when I uttered the name “Liz Cheney,” an employee behind the cash register hurled a threatening epithet. Then a beefy and tattooed supervisor, Torrey Price, 48, came over mad as hell. His mask hung below his nose when he told me, “I don’t think she spoke for Wyoming.”
Price never votes in primaries but said he will in August 2022 — to oust Cheney. He shared more of his thoughts: the election was stolen, the U.S. Capitol raid was staged, and the number of Covid deaths were grossly inflated. He and his colleague Joe agreed on all of these points, adding that they would not be getting the vaccine.
— At the Outlaw Saloon, I envied the way a recently vaccinated NYT reporter sauntered into the biker bar maskless, when earlier, a middle-aged DJ in a cowboy hat asked me for my credentials. Likely because there were only two masks in the bar — the one on my face and another on a table, with the words “political prisoner” printed in red. The guy who threw down that mask predicted the size of the rally against Cheney, telling me the night before, “I guarantee you there will be 600 people there.” I didn’t believe him.
— At the steakhouse, our comely waitress said “a lot of people are fired up” about Cheney. As a lifelong native of Wyoming, she said Cheney made a grave mistake by not representing the people of her state.
Palmieri concluded: “If there was any doubt this is still Trump’s Republican Party, my time in Cheyenne dispelled it.”
The push to embrace Trumpism is roiling other state Republican parties as well. In Wisconsin, where 15 Republican lawmakers signed a letter to Vice President Mike Pence the day before the Washington, D.C. riot urging him to postpone the certification, and two Republican congressmen from the state, Scott Fitzgerald and Tom Tiffany, objected to the electoral votes, the party is divided into two camps.
“The Republican Party right now is relatively divided, but it's not the traditional ideological divisions that used to be in place, as much as it’s between the sane and insane wings of the party,” RightWisconsin Editor James Wigderson told the Madison Capital Times. “I think that there’s a chance of a real fracture coming.”
Establishment Republicans such as former Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch, however, defended the Trumpists for their paranoia and embrace of partisan disinformation: “That is the perspective they have, that is the view that they have and it’s valid; you can’t say someone’s opinion of a subjective matter is invalid,” she said. “I mean, what gives us the right to judge someone’s opinion like that?”
In Michigan, where Republicans also embraced the “Stop the Steal” campaign prior to the insurrection, the impulse to maintain their embrace of Trumpism remains largely undiminished. The Allegan County Republican Party censured Congressman Fred Upton because he voted to impeach Trump.
“Not a lot appears to be changing. We have former Ambassador Ron Weiser (expected to be the new Michigan GOP chair) and Meshawn Maddock (expected to be Weiser’s co-chair),” WKAR politics reporter Abigail Censky observed. “(Maddock) led ‘Stop the Steal’ efforts in the state and was a key part of the kind of infrastructure to overturn the state’s election results, which we know from bipartisan clerks and expert testimony was a fair and safe and secure election. It’s interesting to see that that’s kind of beyond reproach still, and that, that leadership is still going to go into place.”
And in Georgia, Republican Party officials are grimacing at the wounds being inflicted on their voter-appeal operations by the presence of QAnon-loving Congressman Majorie Taylor Greene in the state’s delegation, as well as in the media as her multiple conspiracist pronouncements—such as her approval of lynching House Speaker Nancy Pelosi—have come increasingly to light.
“If you have any common sense, you know she's an anchor on the party. She is weighing us down,” said Gabriel Sterling, a Georgia Republican election administrator who criticized the baseless election conspiracy theories espoused by Trump and his supporters.
“Some people are saying maybe Nancy Pelosi will throw her out” of Congress, Sterling said. “The Democrats would never throw her out. They want her to be the definition of what a Republican is. They’re gonna give her every opportunity to speak and be heard and look crazy — like what came out Wednesday, the Jewish space laser to start fires. I mean, I don't know how far down the rabbit hole you go.”
The unhinged behavior and conspiracism is widespread. The Oregon GOP’s statement was rife with conspiracy theories, including a passage explaining why they viewed the Jan. 6 insurrection as a false flag operation:
Whereas this false flag will support Joe Biden plans to introducing new domestic terrorism legislation likely placing more emphasis on themes from post-9/11 Patriot Act such as allowing those charged with terrorism to be automatically detained before trial, outlawing donations to government-designated terrorist groups, allowing electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists, letting the government use secret sources in those trials, and perhaps new provisions such as codifying putting conservatives on a secret no-fly list without recourse to due process and restricting free speech, similar to the Sedition Act of 1798, which criminalized making “false statements” critical of the Federal government.
The peculiar combination of self-righteousness, persecution complex, and projection endemic to extremist conspiracism was omnipresent. Shelley Horn, the Wyoming petitioner, blamed Cheney’s impeachment vote for dividing the nation: “It’s just sows more hate and division,” Horn told the Cowboy State Daily, “and people are tired of it. Our country can’t stand much more.”
It’s obvious that some of the party’s national leaders, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, don’t actually believe in these conspiracy theories. But for too long, the party has been comfortable letting their rank-and-file supporters believe them because it’s politically advantageous. Now, true believers are rising up and capturing the leadership of state parties and local activist groups — putting pressure on national politicians to conform to extreme ideas or risk a serious primary threat.
This makes the GOP’s post-Trump trajectory look even scarier. No one person or organization is in charge of the party, in a position to fix the root causes of its continuing turn toward extremism. Reforming the party requires a fight on multiple levels and in multiple arenas: reforms to the local and national party, transformations of both the party and adjacent institutions like Fox News.
This is what Barack Obama adroitly describes as America’s “epistemological crisis.” It will not stop happening as long as there are news organs that traffic in falsehoods as a profit model, and who devote 24 hours a day, seven days a week of broadcast time to using those lies to coach half of the nation on how and why to hate the other half—and politicians gleefully profiting from it as well.
Lindsey Graham, who is, just as evidence that we have not yet exited the worst timeline, still the chair of Senate judiciary committee, went on Fox News Monday evening to deliver a threat. Should House impeachment managers attempt to call a single witness during Trump’s trial before the Senate, Republican senators are going to want witnesses of their own. Which could make this trial last just ages.
But this time around Graham isn’t threatening to call witnesses about such non sequiturs as what Hunter Biden did in Ukraine. Instead the threat is much stranger. If Democrats call even a single witness, it will “open up Pandora’s Box,” according to Graham. Because Republicans will “want the FBI to come in and tell us about how people actually pre-planned this attack.” It’s a threat that’s not only not a threat, it’s one that shows that Graham hasn’t actually read the impeachment documents.
The reason that Graham, and other Republicans, are putting forward “calling in the FBI” as a threat is because of a very simple theme they’ve been repeating since before Trump was actually impeached, again, in the House. If the impeachment is all about Trump inciting the mob that marched on the Capitol, murdered a police officer, and ultimately caused more American deaths than Benghazi while erecting a gallows on the lawn; then the fact that many of those insurgents came prepared for sedition means it’s not Trump’s fault.
Not only is that argument completely foolish on its face, it ignores what’s actually in the impeachment. The supporting materials submitted to the Senate make it explicitly clear that there is more to Trump’s impeachment than a single morning or a single speech.
In the months leading up to January 6, 2021 President Trump engaged in a course of conduct designed to encourage and provoke his supporters to gather in Washington, D.C. and obstruct the process of the electoral votes that would confirm his defeat. That conduct spanned months and included frivolous and harassing lawsuits, direct threats to state and local officials, and false public statements to his supporters, all in an effort to incite his supporters into believing it was their patriotic duty to attack Congress and prevent the peaceful transition of power.
The incitement over which Trump was impeached took place not just on the morning of Jan. 6, but in the preceding months. During those months, Trump repeatedly lied about the outcome of the election, fed a rising tide of rage among his supporters with claims he knew were false, told white supremacist militias to “stand by,” and called on his forces to gather on the day when electoral votes were counted for a “wild” event.
As the impeachment makes clear, Trump acted to “undermine confidence in the results of the election, spread dangerous disinformation, and stoke false and wild conspiracy theories.” The whole body of that action is the reason for Trump’s impeachment and the subject of his trial before the Senate. Trump specifically and repeatedly pointed out Mike Pence and members of Congress as targets for the hatred of the supporters he had inflamed with a stream of continuous lies.
So why does Graham think calling the FBI to speak to how the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and others came prepared to storm the Capitol and seek congressional hostages is somehow a threat to the Democratic case? That’s because from the very beginning Republicans—and especially Republicans appearing on Fox and other right-wing media—have been repeating a claim that the impeachment is all about Trump inciting the march on the Capitol in his speech at the “Stop the Steal” rally that morning. According to the framing they’ve been selling Fox viewers, if Trump didn’t expressly tell people to invade the Capitol that morning, he wasn’t really responsible. And if any of the treasonous mob came prepared to violence, it’s proof that the insurgency was not Trump’s fault.
Unfortunately for Graham and others, this reading of the impeachment is as fantastical as the lies Trump told leading up to Jan. 6. The impeachment makes it clear that Trump worked for months to build anger and hatred among his supporters though repeated lies about the election. Trump supporters began planning violence against election supervisors in both Nevada and in Pennsylvania within hours of Trump standing up in the early hours of Nov. 4 to falsely claim victory. Trump encouraged that violence in every statement, every rally, every tweet between the election and Jan. 6. Trump didn’t even disown the invaders while they were inside the Capitol, stepping out to say “we love you” and calling them “very special.”
If Lindsey Graham thinks that calling the FBI is some kind of threat … call them. Call in the agents that have been imbedded with the Proud Boys and Ohio Militia. Call in the agents that have been warning of the increased threat of white supremacist violence, only to have their warnings swatted down. Call them all. If what it takes to purge Trump from the system is pouring out all the poison in public, let’s do that.
It shouldn’t be required. As Graham says in his interview on Fox, he “knows what happened that day.” It should be more than enough to convict Trump and remove the possibility that he will ever again hold public office. But if it’s not … witnesses, sir. Let us have the witnesses.
