Trump’s offer to pardon Jan. 6 insurgents is witness tampering, and it’s not just about Jan. 6

There’s a long perception that Donald Trump makes his living as a real estate developer. However, it’s been clear for a long time that Trump’s major occupation is actually going to court. Even before he announced his candidacy in 2015, Trump had been involved in over 3,500 court cases. That doesn’t just include all the times Trump has sued contractors, or all the times contractors have sued Trump. It includes the 106 charges of money laundering lodged against one Trump casino in just 18 months. It does not include the settlement to end legal proceedings over Trump’s fake university scam, or the settlement over Trump’s fake charity scam, and any of the dozens of legal filings Trump has taken in an effort to keep his taxes hidden. It definitely doesn’t include all the lawsuits Trump has filed in an attempt to prevent information from being revealed from his time in the White House, or the hundreds of lawsuits and appeals his team pushed following the election.

The point is, Trump may not be a lawyer, but there are few attorneys in the nation who have anything like Trump’s level of experience in weaseling out of legal issues. That includes how to threaten, pay off, and generally influence witnesses.

That particular skill was evident during Trump’s first impeachment, and during the whole Trump-Russia investigation, where Trump repeatedly made clear that those who kept their lips zipped would find a nice little bonus. Right, Mr. Manafort? While those who cooperated in any way would be left out to dry. Got that, Mr. Cohen

So when Trump gets on a rally stage and tells Jan. 6 defendants that, should he return to power, a pardon is on the menu for them all, he understands that this influences how those charged in connection with the insurgency will testify. And that message goes out to more than just the people who have already been indicted.

As CNN reports, Trump’s offer to issue pardons is absolutely a form of witness tampering. That would be true even if the people involved thought the odds of Trump getting back in the White House were no better than 50-50, but that’s not the crowd he’s addressing. Trump is making this pitch directly to people involved in Jan. 6—the same crowd who thought he’d be restored to power that day, or on Jan. 20, or in April, or in August, or … soon. The people involved in the pro-Trump insurgency are the deepest of his deep swamp believers. They don’t just believe Trump has a chance of being back behind the Resolute Desk, they think it’s inevitable.

So when Trump tells them that he’s got pardons in the works, they understand what this means: Shut up, hunker down, and wait for rescue. No one is exactly unaware of this.

“Robert Jenkins, who is an attorney for several January 6 riot defendants, including Anthony Antonio, said Wednesday his clients are aware of Trump's offers for potential pardons and that the former President's offers could impact the defendants' cooperation. Jenkins also said he is not sure Trump's comments rise to the level of witness tampering but said the former President is putting his ‘fingers on the scales.’”

It’s hard to be more blatant than this. However, much of the media will apparently wait until Trump puts it in writing for them before getting a tiny dab upset.

But it’s not just the people arrested for waving Confederate flags or brandishing handcuffs in the Capitol who are the targets of this message. In addition to the messy, violent insurgency that took place on Jan. 6, there was an even larger threat: the extensive coup attempt conducted by Trump with the cooperation of Republican officials from county level chairmen to members of Congress.

Indictments related to that coup have not yet been filed, but the United States House Select Committee on the Jan. 6 Attack has been making it clearer and clearer that they have all the evidence necessary to explain every step in the six-point plan to overturn democracy. The subpoenas that the select committee has sent to former Trump advisers, as well as members of the slates of false electors assembled to support the attempt, show that the investigation is going well beyond people wearing horned helmets. 

Those people are also getting the message that Trump will save them if they give him a chance. And since some of those same people are in sitting in the House, Senate, or in a position to affect how results are tallied at the state level, it’s a very special form of incentive. What’s good for Trump is good for them. 

And what’s good for both of them is making sure that the next coup attempt is successful.

JUST NOW (WOW): "Absolutely it would impact not only the attorney's perspective but also the client's...Far less likely to cooperate." Robert Jenkins, an attorney for several 1/6 clients says flatly Trump's pardon statements impact the cases.pic.twitter.com/3Y0u9OhI0W

— John Berman (@JohnBerman) February 2, 2022

Newly revealed texts show Sean Hannity knew Trump’s actions after Jan. 6 were impeachable

During and after the Jan. 6 insurrection, before Fox News went all-in on greasing the skids for fascism, some of its most celebrated on-air personalities acted as though Donald Trump had been hit with a protoplasmic growth ray and was rampaging from sea to rising sea popping whole Taco Bell Expresses in his mouth like Fiddle Faddle.

Indeed, everyone with eyes knew that Trump had gone Bonkers McGee in the wake of the election he decisively lost—including Fox News personalities Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and Brian Kilmeade, who all texted people close to the pr*sident to convince him to give the stand-down order during the Capitol riot. But since those dark days, when our democracy teetered on a knife’s edge, Tucker Carlson has made a career out of convincing people to die of COVID-19 (thereby making Joe Biden look bad, though not quite as bad as those goateed doofuses with intubation tubes down their throats) while assuring them that Jan. 6 had nothing at all to do with salt-of-the-earth Trump supporters. Meanwhile, just Thursday night, Hannity welcomed the disgraced ex-POTUS to his show and Turtle Waxed his barnacled balls to a high shine and finish. 

We’re finally seeing even more evidence that Trump’s media enablers thought Trump had gone too far, and that his actions following the election and the failed Bumblefuck Putsch were way beyond the pale.

A letter from the Jan. 6 Select Committee asking Ivanka Trump to testify includes newly revealed text messages from Hannity to former White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany that outline a strategy for dealing with their glitching ocher overlord:

In the texts, Hannity recaps just a few points of a broader communications plan for responding to the attack, among other pieces of advice.

“1- No more stolen election talk,” Hannity reportedly texted McEnany, who herself sat down with committee investigators last week after being subpoenaed.

Per the letter, he continued, “2- Yes, impeachment and the 25th amendment are real and many people will quit...”

So Hannity knew Trump’s actions were impeachable, huh? That’s not the impression he’s been giving his viewers.

CNN’s Jake Tapper brought former Mike Pence adviser Olivia Troye on his program on Thursday to discuss these new revelations, and boy, was she ever not impressed. (Troye did some great work in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election that helped expose Trump for the menace he was and is.):

TAPPER: “A very interesting text message exchange between Trump loyalist Sean Hannity and then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. It suggests that Hannity texted Kayleigh McEnany on Jan. 7, the day after the insurrection, laying out a five-point approach for talking to then-outgoing President Trump. He started with ‘1) No more stolen election talk, 2) Yes, impeachment and 25th Amendment are real, and many people will quit ...’ to which Kayleigh McEnany responded, ‘Love that. Thank you. That is the playbook. I will help reinforce.’ Hannity, according to these messages, also told McEnany that White House staff should try to keep Trump away from certain people. He texted her, quote, ‘Key now. No more crazy people,’ to which McEnany responded, ‘Yes. 100%.’ We should note that Sean Hannity’s show was a major place where these election lies were told—in fact, they’re being sued as a result—and Kayleigh McEnany is one of the biggest election liars that we know. So what’s your reaction when you see this conversation—this private conversation.”

TROYE: “Well, it’s stunning. It’s stunning to see this full-on evidence of these types of conversations that were happening in the lead-up to Jan. 6, but even more so, just the fact that they knew the gravity of the situation—they knew the repercussions of the possibility of what would happen in continuing down this narrative, and then even more egregious is that now they’ve doubled down on it. Right? And the problem is, not only does this narrative still exist out there—the Big Lie lives on. It’s being used by people who are seeking public office this year. It’s become sort of, the Republican Party’s platform is really the Big Lie and you have to support it or you’re going to get kicked out. … You know, I think it’s important to get this evidence out there to the American people so that they can see that in the lead-up in that situation with Donald Trump, people knew. People knew that this type of action was worthy of impeachment. It was worthy of the 25th Amendment. That these are actual discussions happening with people like Sean Hannity.”

Needless to say, these hair-on-fire texts from Trump’s biggest defenders are damning evidence that they knew he was, at best, out of control and, at worst, dangerously unfit for office. And by that, I mean any office. Or office building. Or office supply store, for that matter.

Naif that I am, I sincerely believed in the aftermath of Jan. 6 that conservatives would resurrect their long-buried shame and denounce Trump. But they sort of puttered around the grave for a few minutes, figured, “Nah, this is too hard,” and went right back to shivving the country full time.

Hopefully, Republicans will begin to slink away in something resembling shame as the Jan. 6 committee unveils more evidence, but I wouldn’t count on it. After all, the Eye of Sour-Don watches, and they dare not displease their master.

Or they could try to cobble together the last remaining shards of their dignity and try to be good-faith actors—instead of, well, just actors. But that’s just never going to happen, is it?

It made author Stephen King shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” and prompted comedian Sarah Silverman to say, “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT.” What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

Can Kevin McCarthy be any more gutless? Yes, he can ‘forget’ what he said to Trump on Jan. 6

In the days following the deadly terrorist insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had no issue going around publicly telling whomever was listening that former President Donald Trump was the man behind the curtain, responsible for leading the mob to riot—which is exactly why the House select committee wants to hear from McCarthy himself. 

According to CNN, McCarthy appeared on KERN, a local Bakersfield, California, radio station on Jan. 12, and spilled the beans on heir Trump. 

"I say he has responsibility," McCarthy said. "He told me personally that he does have some responsibility. I think a lot of people do."

Here's the audio of McCarthy saying Trump has responsibility for Jan. 6th and Trump admitted responsibility. He strongly urges a commission to investigate the attack. McCarthy said Thursday he didn't recall telling members Trump took responsibility.https://t.co/fsZYL5Q1ss pic.twitter.com/T7Rwb8Yd0n

— andrew kaczynski (@KFILE) January 14, 2022

McCarthy also blabbed about Trump to House Republicans during a private conference on Jan. 11. CNN obtained a copy of a transcript of the call. 

"Let me be clear to you and I have been very clear to the President. He bears responsibility for his words and actions. No if ands or buts," McCarthy told House Republicans on Jan. 11, 2021, according to the readout obtained by CNN from a source listening to the call. "I asked him personally today if he holds responsibility for what happened. If he feels bad about what happened. He told me he does have some responsibility for what happened. But he needs to acknowledge that."

But now, all of a sudden, McCarthy apparently has no memory of ever having this conversation, he said during a press conference Thursday. 

During today’s presser, McCarthy said he didn’t remember a call days after January 6 where he told House R’s that Trump had accepted some responsibility for the riots.   @Olivia_Beavers & I reported on it at the time, but I’ve just obtained a more detailed readout of the call: pic.twitter.com/Lr2ktCBnhb

— Melanie Zanona (@MZanona) January 13, 2022

But in the radio interview, McCarthy said he’d spoken with Trump during the insurrection and in fact, was the first person to call him. 

“I told him to go on national TV, tell these people to stop it. He said he didn't know what was happening. We went to the news then to work through that. I asked the president, he has a responsibility. You know what the President does, but you know what? All of us do,” McCarthy said. 

He later added that he told Trump to call in the National Guard and go on TV. 

All of this is of particular interest to the House committee. But of course, McCarthy is a pulling a McCarthy and refusing to cooperate. 

"As a representative and the leader of the minority party, it is with neither regret nor satisfaction that I have concluded to not participate with this select committee's abuse of power that stains this institution today and will harm it going forward," McCarthy said in a statement Wednesday night.

The Republican leader is putting the blame on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the fact that she rejected some of picks to serve on the panel. Pelosi “is not conducting a legitimate investigation,” he’s claiming and the committee "is not serving any legislative purpose."

But Rep. Liz Cheney isn’t playing footsie with these ne’er do wells, and hasn’t ruled out a subpoena for McCarthy, saying, "We're going to evaluate our options, but we will get to the truth."

A letter from the committee outlines the investigation into McCarthy. 

“We also must learn about how the President's plans for January 6th came together, and all the other ways he attempted to alter the results of the election," wrote committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Democrat from Mississippi. "For example, in advance of January 6th, you reportedly explained to Mark Meadows and the former President that objections to the certification of the electoral votes on January 6th 'was doomed to fail.'"

The committee believes that all of McCarthy’s interactions with Trump go toward explaining the ex-president’s state of mind during the attack. 

"The Select Committee has contemporaneous text messages from multiple witnesses identifying significant concerns following January 6th held by White House staff and the President's supporters regarding President Trump's state of mind and his ongoing conduct. It appears that you had one or more conversations with the President during this period," the letter states.
"It appears that you may also have discussed with President Trump the potential he would face a censure resolution, impeachment, or removal under the 25th Amendment. It also appears that you may have identified other possible options, including President Trump's immediate resignation from office," it added.

McCarthy refuses to testify. ‘I wish that he were a brave and honorable man,’ says Cheney

Reinforcing the degree to which Republicans do not want the truth about events on Jan. 6 to reach the public, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has announced he will not cooperate with a request to voluntarily testify before the select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol. In refusing the request, McCarthy becomes the latest in a string of Republican representatives who have made it clear that talking about their role in events leading up to the insurgency is the last thing they want to do.

On Wednesday, the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol sent a letter to McCarthy making clear that his testimony is critical to investigation of events that sent Congress scrambling as the Capitol was invaded. McCarthy didn’t just speak with Donald Trump before and after the attempt to prevent the counting of electoral votes, he had a phone conversations with Trump in the midst of the hours-long violence. That conversation reportedly included McCarthy yelling in anger “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?” after Trump refused to take action to end the violence. Current accounts of the phone call are secondhand, though they are included on an official statement from Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler.

In the past month, the committee has released text messages from members of Congress as well as those from Fox News propagandists and even Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr. Those texts clearly show that both Republican lawmakers and right-wing media understood that Trump was in control of the violence. However, the released messages were directed at former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. A full account of McCarthy’s conversation, including an accurate transcription of Trump’s replies, could be crucial in demonstrating his knowledge of the violence and his complicity in refusing to end the attack.

In refusing to testify, McCarthy is making clear—again—that his first loyalty is to Trump, with any concerns about the truth or what’s best for the nation somewhere far behind.

The letter from Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson noted that McCarthy not only had conversations with Trump concerning his refusal to stop the violence on Jan. 6, but about “the potential [Trump] would face a censure resolution, impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment. It also appears that you may have identified other possible options, including President Trump’s immediate resignation from office.”

In the hours immediately following the assault, it appeared that McCarthy was angry enough to momentarily forget that he had cooperated in turning his party over to Trump. However, McCarthy swiftly remedied this situation. McCarthy flew to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage and turned his attacks away from Trump and toward his fellow Republicans who failed to join in the leadership cult. That includes attacking Rep. Liz Cheney, one of two Republicans now on the select committee.

It’s been clear for months that McCarthy is terrified to make a full account of his conversations with Trump. His attempts to dodge any questions have led him into making a claim of pseudoprivilege in which “my conversations with the president are my conversations with the president.” Executive privilege does not extend to conversations held with members of the legislative branch. 

On receiving the letter from the select committee, it took only a few hours for McCarthy announce that he would not be appearing. McCarthy—who earlier tried to sabotage the committee with an attempt to force the committee to include in its membership some of those known to be most involved in perpetuating the Big Lie around the 2020 election—indicated that the committee was “only out to hurt political opponents” and that he would not cooperate with what he called “an abuse of power.”

It took even less time for Cheney to make clear what she thought of McCarthy’s refusal. As reported in The Washington Post, Cheney had this to say about her titular leader in the House.

“I wish that he were a brave and honorable man,” said Cheney. “He’s clearly trying to cover up what happened. He has an obligation to come forward and we’ll get to the truth.”

However, in an interview with MSNBC, Rep. Jamie Raskin noted that McCarthy has some very personal reasons for keeping his lips zipped—reasons that include his involvement in possible criminal charges of conspiracy. In recent weeks, reports indicate that the select committee has been seriously considering how it may make criminal referrals to the Department of Justice for those involved not just in planning and encouraging the violence on Jan. 6, but for the dozens of Republicans who were intimately involved in a scheme to overturn the results of the election by refusing to honor electoral votes.

Related to that scheme were revelations on Tuesday showing that Republicans forged documents in multiple states to falsely declare Trump the winner in states where President Joe Biden actually came out on top. This is just one aspect of a plan that was presented in an extensive PowerPoint slide deck to Republican members of the House so that they could properly execute their part of the conspiracy. 

It’s not clear if McCarthy was present for that presentation, but if he were to appear to testify, he would certainly be asked about this event and other meetings held in preparation for overthrowing the legitimate government of the United States. 

School board forgets to vet newly sworn in school board member—uncover he was at the Jan. 6 rally

Jefferson Parish, the largest school district in Louisiana, must be desperate for board members.

Why in God’s name would they swear in a contractor from Metairie who has openly bragged about being at the “Stop the Steal” rally in D.C. on Jan. 6, called those who opposed the insurrection that followed—and pointed to former President Donald Trump as the inciter-in-chief—as “traitors,” and blamed teachers for “the fall of our young people in this country”?

Rafael Rafidi, who was sworn in during a special meeting on Wednesday, was obviously not very well-vetted for his new role.

According to Nola.com, seven of the nine board members voted for Rafidi, while board member Ricky Johnson voted against him and Simeon Dickerson abstained; the next day, Dickerson voted for Rafidi’s removal and wants Rafidi to resign. 

“I actually watched this guy take an oath to the Constitution, the very Constitution that he tried to overthrow just a year ago—the irony of it,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “He attended the insurrection and he marched on the Capitol.”

All it would have taken was a quick look into Rafidi’s social media to see what a complete and utter dumpster fire he was. 

In Feb. 2021, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu tweeted his praise for Sen. Bill Cassidy for voting to impeach Trump. Rafidi replied, calling  Sen. John Kennedy "an embarrassment" for voting against impeachment.

“Go f--k yourselves," Rafidi tweeted. And in another tweet, he called Cassidy a "piece of s—t" and Landrieu a "f-----g traitor.”

Although it isn’t clear from any of his social media whether Rafidi entered the Capitol on Jan. 6, on Jan. 13, he did tweet-brag about his time at the rally. 

"I was there, heard the entire speech, and walked peacefully with thousands singing God bless America and praying on the way to the capital. What's true now for sure is the FIX IS IN! And it's all of you in the media and government. What a shame!"

And long before the pandemic forced teachers into a virtual and unwieldy position of teaching from home, in 2018, Rafidi was attacking them on social media. 

"Teachers are the fall of our young people in this country. No values, no work ethic, and just suck as much as you can from those that work hard. Good job,” he tweeted. 

“I know some hard-working teachers in Jefferson Parish that bust their tills every day,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “It’s a direct slap in the face and he’s unfit to serve as a school board member. This is not what Jefferson Parish represents and this is not what a school board member represents.”

If all that isn’t enough, Rafidi has a serious racist streak. He recently tweeted his criticism about the NFL playing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” also known as the Black National Anthem. 

Take note: the school district he’s been sworn into, according to its website, serves roughly 50,000 students—about 38% of its student population is Black. 

“This guy can do more damage in six months than all of us can do in eight years,” Dickerson told The Daily Beast. “He’s bad for the progression of race relations in Jefferson Parish.”

Latino lawmakers recall Jan. 6 terror: ‘I’m not white, I’m going to be a target’

California Rep. Jimmy Gomez said the halls of Congress had already been hostile before the previous president incited his white insurrectionist supporters to violently storm the U.S. Capitol to try to overturn the 2020 election one year ago today.

The Oversight and Reform vice-chair told Newsweek that the House was amid a vote on the Build Back Better bill last November when he was verbally accosted in an elevator by an unmasked Republican legislator. "You people are ruining the fucking country,” he said Texas Rep. Roger Williams told him. “Gomez, who is Mexican-American, was taken aback,” Newsweek reported. Williams would later vote to overturn democracy and against the impeachment of the disgraced former president.

“Every member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) inside the building during the attack who spoke with Newsweek thought it would be the last day of their life,” the report said leading into the one-year anniversary of the insurrection. Gomez said that even as he considered ways to look like less of a target to the insurrectionists—such as removing his Congressional pin and jacket—he could not allow himself to just run away. “So he began helping lawmakers who were older and couldn't move as quickly as he could,” the report continued.

California’s Nanette Baragán told Newsweek that she had similar intuition to hide her pin. But other things could not be so easily hidden.

"The part that is not often spoken of is the fear members of Congress of color had," she said in the report. "When you're a person of color and a member of Congress, the thought on that day was ‘hide your pin, I'm not white, I'm going to be a target.’ That was something that was really real."

It wasn’t just members of the Hispanic Caucus, either. “One year after Jan. 6, Sarah Groh, Representative Ayanna Pressley’s chief of staff, still does not know what happened to the panic buttons torn from their office,” Boston Globe’s Jazmine Ulloa tweeted earlier this week. “It’s one of many details still under investigation, and a memory that continues to haunt her.”

Ulloa writes in her piece that the U.S. Capitol is also a workplace for janitors and food service workers. Some of these workers, notably Black janitors, had to clean up the mess created by white insurrectionists.

For Texas Rep. Veronica Escobar, the insurrection brought back terrible memories of the white supremacist mass shooting that shook El Paso in 2019. In tweets immediately after the insurrection, she wrote that the terrorists “not only breached the Capitol and got into Statuary Hall, but they were banging on the locked doors of the House Chamber as we were told by Capitol Police to get down on our knees.” 

In his House testimony last July, U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell recalled how he also had his life threatened by racist insurrectionists.

“I was at the front line and apparently, even through my mask, they saw my skin color and said, ‘You’re not even an American,’” the Latino U.S. military veteran told legislators. Naturalized as an American citizen more than two decades ago, Gonell said insurrectionists “called me traitor, a disgrace and that I, an Army veteran and a police officer, should be executed.”

"This wasn't a group of tourists. This was an armed insurrection,” President Biden said during stirring remarks on Thursday. “They weren't looking to uphold an election. They were here to overturn one."

In a statement Thursday, Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego said that “if we want to keep our democracy intact, then we must bring to justice those responsible for Jan. 6th, including everyone from those who laid siege to the building to those who sat idle in the White House or in Congress as their plans came to fruition. He urged the passage of pro-democracy legislation including the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. “To do so is not a partisan or political issue—it is the bare minimum we must do if we want to keep our democracy.”

Anniversary of Capitol attack brings a dilemma for teachers in Republican areas

On Jan. 6, 2021, we saw history being made as the U.S. Capitol came under attack by insurrectionists intent on overturning a presidential election. On Jan. 6, 2022, after a year in which many Republicans have decided that those events were just fine, actually, teachers across the country will have to decide whether or how to engage with that recent history.

For teachers in heavily Republican areas where the political pressure is to deny the reality of what happened, it could be a tricky day.

Liz Wagner, an eighth- and ninth-grade social studies teacher in Iowa, told the Associated Press that last year, administrators warned teachers to be careful in discussing the attack, and students pushed back against her use of the (accurate) term “insurrection.” At the time, she turned to the dictionary definition of the word—but this year, she’ll be more cautious, instead having students watch video of the attack and write about what they saw.

“This is kind of what I have to do to ensure that I’m not upsetting anybody,” she said. “Last year I was on the front line of the COVID war, trying to dodge COVID, and now I’m on the front line of the culture war, and I don’t want to be there.”

Anton Schulzki, the president of the National Council for the Social Studies and a teacher in Colorado, will be teaching about Jan. 6, secure in a contract with academic freedom protections despite the recent election of right-wing school board members in his district. 

“I do feel,” he told the AP, “that there may be some teachers who are going to feel the best thing for me to do is to ignore this because I don’t want to put myself in jeopardy, because I have my own bills to pay, my own house to take care of, my own kids to take back and forth to school.”

And no wonder, with Republican-controlled states passing law after law targeting the teaching of race in schools, but often throwing in broad language prohibiting the teaching of basically anything any (white) parent decides to complain about. “On the face of it, if you read the laws, they’re quite vague and, you know, hard to know actually what’s permissible and what isn’t,” Abby Weiss, who develops teaching tools for the nonprofit Facing History and Ourselves, said.

One thing teachers could bring to their classrooms to frame discussion of the insurrection might be the words of some prominent Republicans. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, say.

“Jan. 6th was a disgrace. American citizens attacked their own government. They used terrorism to try to stop a specific piece of democratic business they did not like. Fellow Americans beat and bloodied our own police. They stormed the Senate floor. They tried to hunt down the Speaker of the House. They built a gallows and chanted about murdering the Vice President,” McConnell said on Feb. 13, 2021. “They did this because they had been fed wild falsehoods by the most powerful man on Earth—because he was angry he’d lost an election.”

Or House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who on Jan. 13, 2021, said, “Some say the riots were caused by antifa. There’s absolutely no evidence of that, and conservatives should be the first to say it. ... Most Americans want neither inaction nor retribution. They want durable, bipartisan justice. That path is still available, but it is not the path we are on today. That doesn’t mean the president is free from fault. The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.”

McCarthy, has, of course, changed his tune since in response to pressure from his conference and from Donald Trump. But he said that.

The Republican effort to sweep U.S. history under the rug has been most focused on the long ugly history of racism in this country. Unfortunately, though, the tools they’ve developed to keep teachers from teaching that set of truths will work just as well to keep teachers from teaching the truth about what Donald Trump supporters did just a year ago. Teachers in districts with right-wing school board members or in states with laws targeting critical race theory are right to be nervous—that’s the whole point. 

Memories of an insurrection: A reporter’s perspective

I have a lot of guilt about Jan. 6. I was assigned to cover the certification of the election that day and I expected it to be rowdy—D.C. is a protest town, after all. What ultimately unfolded that afternoon was the stuff my nightmares had been made of for weeks. A sickly anxiety bubbled up in me for the first time in earnest last September during a White House press conference, former President Donald Trump said openly that he wouldn’t commit to a peaceful transfer of power.

I wasn’t naïve. I covered his presidency from its inception. I knew who he was, I knew what he was capable of. I had listened to him baselessly cast doubt over mail-in ballots for months before the attack on the Capitol. I remembered his self-proclaimed jest about abolishing presidential term limits during an interview with Chuck Todd.

And I knew how devout his voters were—some of them had spit on me in 2016 for the sin of doing my job in their presence when I covered one of his rallies. I spent many weekends and late nights privately discussing how dangerous I believed the cult around him had become since the early days of his campaign.

So, as we careened toward January 2021, I quietly and often wondered if America was approaching a dangerous cliff. To my ear, Trump wasn’t just bloviating after his defeat. He was forecasting with his ‘Stop the Steal’ blathering. He was angry. And few things are scarier to me than a bitter man with great power and a historically absent sense of humor. Trump is not a man who takes losing well because his giant ego simply cannot allow it.

But I didn’t want to sound alarmist. I didn’t want to give him more power than he already had. He was, after all, a Mango Mussolini. His presidency and his powers were waning, so of course, I told myself, he would go down whining all the way.

But his cries of fraud came faster and clearer. I started questioning if it were truly possible for the U.S. to fall over some ragged edge into an autocracy. I feared the cowardly obedience of sycophants and the corrupt acquiescence of officials who would torch democracy, flawed though it may be, on little more than empty promises from a longtime charlatan.

By early November, I was spent emotionally and physically. I gave myself some cold comfort when writing a piece the month before about the so-called guardrails built into the Constitution. I trusted the voices I interviewed on and off the record, but the nagging gnawing worry was still there.

I would go to sleep most nights having dreams where Trump’s voice reverberated in my head, though his words were incomprehensible.

I’m getting paranoid, I’m overdoing it, I thought. I needed a break. I was working full time and had been caring for my dying mother. So, I cashed in some vacation hours for the days around the election.

That way, I told myself, when the day finally rolled around, I would go out, cast my vote, take my mom to vote, and go home. I wouldn’t be knee-deep in the shit. I would instead listen from a distance. I would bake bread. I would knead dough until my knuckles hurt. I had done my duty for four years, I told myself. I was sitting out election night. I did not feel bad about that.

It was “self-care” and for just a while, I felt light.

Then the votes were counted and eventually, Biden was declared the rightful winner. There was exhalation.

I returned to work. The heaviness returned with me.

After election night, after tabulations, more and more I imagined Trump prowling the Oval Office, pacing or cursing his cronies as they gathered about him to offer their reassurances or schemes. Or both.

Then it was Jan. 6. There had been promises of wild protests to come. My anxiety was ratcheted up.

I stayed up late the night before the assault. I checked and rechecked my camera a hundred times if I did it once, before finally crawling into bed. It was charged. My backup batteries were ready. I packed my bag neatly with a first aid kit stowed inside, as well as a small tube of pepper spray.

The first aid kit now came with me everywhere after spending a summer covering mass protests in response to the police killing of George Floyd. The pepper spray was a new addition.

During the Floyd demonstrations, I rarely if ever felt unsafe. I never hid my press badge. The only harm to befall me during those many weeks was when police pepper-sprayed me and others as I reported on those exercising their right to assemble.

But on the eve of Jan. 6, I worried about pro-Trump street brawlers. They had been in Washington in December and a month before that, I recorded a caravan of his devotees speeding down the highway in considerable number. Two days before the certification, I noticed such an inordinate number of cars in my Northern Virginia neighborhood with out-of-state plates—Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Florida—that I started to tally them up on scrap paper between red lights each time I saw them in.

What is going on? I would say aloud to no one in particular.

My trust was low, my cynicism high.

I dressed on the morning of Jan. 6 in jeans and a black hoodie and a leather jacket and shoved my press badge down my shirt. I wanted to blend in the best I could. I felt the hard plastic stick to my chest. Unlike the Floyd demonstrations, I didn’t want anyone to know off the rip that I was press.

I traded out my surgical mask for one that looked like the U.S. flag. I got one for Jack Rodgers, my friend and fellow reporter who would cover the day with me. I shoved $20 in my shoe in case of an emergency. I wrote my mother’s name and cell phone number on my forearm in marker. I shoved my camera into my jacket and hid the strap under the bulk.

While it was barely light out, I drove to Maryland to pick up Jack and we hauled it into D.C., talking about how long the day would be.

I asked Jack to remember that day recently and he described the morning perfectly in an email to me: “cold, windy, overcast,” he wrote.  It was “a day that settled into a generally uneasy haze,” he recalled.

We knew many Republican legislators would object to the counting of electoral votes and we expected, after grabbing some photos and interviews outside of the Capitol that morning, to spend the day in the press gallery in the House of Representatives, writing until our fingers cramped.

When we finally got into the district and approached a parking garage near the Capitol—street closures were in effect—we saw Trump’s supporters everywhere, walking, driving, emerging from train stations.

Jack recalled recently to me the rows of boarded-up shop windows. 

“We saw cars and trucks around us, some painted with anti-Biden language in washable dye on their doors. But what most of the vehicles had in common were that they were from out of state—Georgia, Texas, North Carolina,” he said. 

Pulling into a garage, we queued behind a line of trucks adorned with Trump paraphernalia. Supporters were streaming in and out of the garage on foot.

“I saw cars were following one another down a spiraling, underground garage. The thought of navigating a winding, underground space if something were to go wrong didn’t sit well with me, as we slowly approached the initial ramp into the unknown,” Jack wrote to me this week. 

We didn’t want to get stuck underground, but options were few. As our turn with the parking attendant was coming up and we considered the subterranean option, we noticed a lone empty spot near the ground level exit right next to the attendant’s station.

We joked to each other: How much does that spot cost?

We greased the attendant with $20.

We parked in it and popped out into the street with crowds already building and flowing in a chaotic mass toward the Ellipse. It was a sea of black, blue, and red with giant pops of yellow from Gadsden flags fluttering high on makeshift flagpoles. I noticed men wearing shirts honoring the confederacy or heralding Trump’s 2020, 2024, and 2028 presidencies. Three Percenter insignia and ubiquitous symbols of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers were never far from view. There was a lot of camouflage. 

If I stared too long at anyone, trying to assess how to approach for an interview, my gaze was often met with a furrowed brow or hard eyes. I looked through my viewfinder at one point, scanning throngs walking toward the Ellipse. I focused my lens on a group of men who then stared in my direction. They signaled to each other and then to me before walking my way. I moved quickly into the crowd to lose them.

“We took refuge near a federal building,” Jack remembered. “We were conscious about being near a law enforcement officer or some federal structure. We wanted to feel like we were protected.”

I reemerged in the middle of a street and this time, bumped into an elderly woman with a dark cowboy hat. She was with her husband and as waves of people passed by, she asked me to take their picture. Smiling with noses tinged red from the cold, they were euphoric. Their mood was so light and so in contrast with the more foreboding characters around them, that once the ice was broken with a photo, I started interviewing.

They were there to support their president. He asked them to be there, she said.

She was beaming.

I asked if I could take a picture of my own and without hesitation, they huddled together and let me snap their photo. That was the last and probably most normal thing I remember seeing that day: an older couple lovingly holding each other and smiling for a camera.

We walked further into the crowd. There were whiffs of beer, cigarette smoke, and occasionally, the faint aroma of marijuana. There were loud whoops and yells of excitement. There was music somewhere. There was a muffled voice yelling angrily through a speakerphone in the distance. There were chirps from police cars somewhere, trying to direct traffic.

The crowd was overwhelmingly white and male. Some men wore flak jackets. I saw a few men with helmets on. I remember a man with kneepads. Another with elbow guards and gloves and rope dangling from his waist. It took a split second to reconcile in my brain that they were wearing the gear for their protection. The rope didn’t register at all. I looked in the crowd for police and saw very few.

During the Floyd protests, I couldn’t swing my arm without hitting an officer.

“I remember the busyness of it all, the throngs of eventual rioters seeming to swirl into the street in a searching, grasping manner. The underlying feeling of trepidation and uncertainty as the nation lurched through a state of purgatory in anticipation of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. The fear of being seriously harmed for doing my job,” Jack said.

It was around this time I felt a shift in the air. It’s hard to describe and harder yet to believe when it is described, but when you have spent many months covering protests or otherwise large events, you attune yourself to energetic shifts in a space. Sometimes there’s an electricity in the air. Sometimes there’s that ‘pregnant pause.’ Sometimes there’s a sudden hush that falls.

In these moments, I’ve learned to start looking around.  

I saw shoulders hunched high at the neck. I saw mouths pulled tautly and eyes darting around. I watched hand gestures flail wildly and observed fists clenching and opening. I could hear people cursing. There was a bad feeling and Trump had not even spoken yet. It was almost as if a message had swept through the crowd for them to tighten up and forgo the revelries.

That euphoria I saw on the older woman’s face was nowhere in the faces around me now.

We kept walking for a short moment and as we did, I locked eyes with a man passing by with straggly blonde hair and a white puffer coat hanging wide open.

He had a face mask covering his mouth though not his nose. And on the mask was a giant red, unmistakable swastika. He rushed right past me, and then another man blew by, this one with Nazi ephemera sewn to a bag he had draped over his arm. His forearm was exposed, and I noticed an SS tattoo.

I stopped in my tracks, and I turned to Jack.

I had been pushing myself so hard to get to this moment, to see the end of this presidency, to close this chapter. But every instinct in my body was now screaming at me to self-preserve at all costs. 

Who would care for my mother if I get hurt today? played on a loop in my head.

“I have a bad feeling,” I said. “I think we should get a few more photos and get the hell out of here.”

I pulled out my camera to assess what I had shot so far. The battery light blinked twice and the camera died. I cursed it, grabbed a fresh battery pack, and slid that into place. The camera turned on. I started to flip through the images. I cursed again. The photos were too dark. It had been overcast and I didn’t have a flash. I checked the shutter speed—it was set too fast. How did that happen? I had been so careful.

In the middle of telling Jack the bad news about our photos, my camera died again. I was livid now.  I fetched yet another battery. I slid that one into place. Now the camera wouldn’t come on at all. It didn’t make any sense.

We were making a slight spectacle of ourselves standing there. There was still time until certification and I live just over the Potomac, so I suggested going back to my house where I could get new batteries and upload whatever salvageable photos I had before returning to the Capitol.

On the walk to the garage, there were fewer people on the street. They had mostly congregated by the Ellipse and were preparing to listen to Trump’s remarks—remarks that would eventually earn him an incitement to insurrection charge in his second impeachment. Remarks that nearly got some of my friends killed. Remarks that led to the deaths of police officers and to hundreds of injuries. Remarks that inspired Ashli Babbitt to breach a federal building thinking she was invincible. Remarks that led her to disregard multiple verbal warnings as she tried to breach a congressional chamber. Remarks that left her bleeding on the floor, sucking for air as her life needlessly drained from her body and her compatriots mostly stood around, watching her die.

Long before Babbitt’s death, when we were finally at my house, Trump’s rally and the morning’s speeches were unfolding rapidly. 

We listened to Rudy Giuliani call for “trial by combat” and we looked at each other. Few things could really shake us at that point in Trump’s presidency but this rhetoric was so baldly inflammatory in light of what we had seen that morning that a surge of goosebumps ran up my arms.

It didn’t feel safe to return. We worried about bomb threats. Our concern would prove perfectly reasonable in no time when pipe bombs were later discovered at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee buildings.

Maybe once the crowd had dispersed from his speech at the Ellipse, we could head back for the count itself, we said. We didn’t realize people were already on their way to breach the Capitol at this time. 

Jack was assigned to cover Trump’s speech. He sat at my desk in my home office to write while I fleshed out paragraphs for the impending certification story.

Trump droned on for over an hour, spewing lie after lie about election fraud. We flipped between video feed from his speech and the House and Senate chambers where certification of Joe Biden’s electoral victory would soon be underway.

The next sequence is a blur. Pence released a letter saying he would not object to the count, I hurriedly wrote two pieces at once. The proceedings were going and I next remember Rep. Jim McGovern standing at the dais and calling for order before abruptly recessing.

There was a commotion. The commotion was the mob. 

The next few hours we spent writing and watching in shock while updating our story every few minutes. We texted friends inside the Capitol. People texted us to ask if we were okay. Jack remembered in our recent conversation how we received emergency broadcast alerts on our phones detailing statewide curfews in Virginia in response to the insurrection. 

We were safe. But it was only chance, only dumb luck, that had brought us to this safe harbor. I apologized to Jack profusely, not knowing what had happened with the camera. I still don’t know. He was reassuring and grateful not to be hurt.

We ate pizza in my living room with our eyes glued to CSPAN and listened closely when Mitch McConnell, if but for that moment, finally divorced himself from Trump, saying there was no fraud, the election was not close and the electoral college margin was almost identical to what it was in 2016. 

For the rest of my life, I will be able to hear Jacob Chansley’s guttural scream during the breach of the Capitol when I call that day back in my head. I didn’t know who or what it was when I heard it the first time. His yell carried in the background noise of live footage that afternoon that was being broadcast by CSPAN. But it was so out of place, so raw. It is seared into my brain.

The next time I heard Chansley’s voice was when I reviewed footage from inside the Capitol by The New Yorker. It was unmistakable. He was unmistakable.

The rioters broke something sacred that day and I will forever associate Chansley’s moan as the signifier of that break.

Now, almost a year later, I find myself still struggling with guilt. I should have been in the Capitol. I should have had another battery. Why did this happen? I pride myself on being prepared and having contingencies for my contingencies. Yet everything fell apart that day.

“Neither you nor I will ever have a story about pushing furniture against the door of a Congressional office to prevent incensed Trump supporters from breaking through. We’ll never have to live with the sound of rioters trying to break onto the House floor, like Rep. Jason Crowe, Rep. Bennie Thompson or Rep. Peter Welch, to name only a few,” Jack said to me recently. “What I still reflect on is the guilt both of us felt. The regret for having not been with our colleagues and members of Congress as they endured one of the most terrifying and paralyzing moments in our nation’s history. The ostracizing feeling of having watched some of our friends endure potential violence from the security of home.”

I only managed to get one picture off my memory card that was even remotely usable. It was so dark I had to use Photoshop to brighten it and it was of such bad quality that my editor didn’t care to use it even when we ran the story that day:

Was down on the Hill this morning before the melee and noted the distress or danger position of the Trump banner flown. Apologies for quality, had issues with brightness due to very overcast morning and shoddy camera function. @CourthouseNews pic.twitter.com/McUgNx3tqO

— Brandi Buchman (@Brandi_Buchman) January 6, 2021

Now the first anniversary of the insurrection approaches. Talking about this piece, Jack said it was easier to look back now  and dismiss the feelings of guilt. 

“The individual responsibility of reporting what we saw and what we knew about the moment, weighed heavily on both of us after a month of traveling to the District and reporting on the racial justice movement in D.C.,” he said. 

Like me, he’s done some introspective searching. That guilt is an “ongoing project,” he said. 

“Like most truths, I think multifaceted reasons exist: I’m over-conflating responsibility to whatever I understand is my duty as a reporter, for example,” he said.

Sifting through the memories with me, some of the other details have grown fuzzy. It’s harder to recall what his family said when they texted him, frightened for his safety. It’s harder for him to remember what we discussed over a beer in that miserable afterglow of the attack. 

”But I’ll never forget the underpinning feeling of uncertainty of that day or the National Mall vibrating with angry, insidious activity,” he said.

Some things are quite different now. Some things are very much the same.

Now I cover the insurrection at the Capitol on a regular basis, but I do it for a new organization. Now when I go out into the field, I won’t write my mother’s name on my arm but instead I choose someone who is alive to bail me out or identify my body. I don’t get to write with Jack all the time anymore or decompress with him, one of the few people who experienced this time in history with me up close. 

Now, I get off at a decent hour. Now, I sleep a lot better. For now, my every waking moment is not consumed by a man hellbent on retaining power at all costs.

Amid all these many changes, however, there is a frightening consistency since Jan. 6: Many of the people who were willing to endanger our democracy a year ago are still very much in the ranks of our government today. 

Jim Jordan isn’t happy about being called before the Jan. 6 Select Committee, but it could be worse

On Wednesday, Rep. Jim Jordan received a letter from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6, inviting him to voluntarily appear before the committee and discuss “in detail” his communications with Donald Trump on Jan. 6. And Jan. 5. And every other date. The committee would also like to hear about Jordan’s communications with Trump’s campaign staff and legal team involved in planning the multi-stage coup.

This letter was phrased in a way that acknowledges the extraordinary nature of a House committee call for a member of the House to testify. It’s also phrased in a way that makes it clear the committee already knows Jordan was deeply involved in planning the attempted overthrow of the legitimate government. Mostly because Jordan can’t stop running his mouth when talking to right-wing media. It’s not so much that the letter is couched in a subtle threat that failure to cooperate will net Jordan a subpoena, even if the evidence comes out anyway. Because it’s really not that subtle.

On Wednesday evening, Jordan did what any Republican called to tell the truth before the nation does: He went on Fox News to whine and complain that the committee isn’t playing fair. But if Jordan thinks that he can just join the long queue of Trump advisers who are doing their best to delay until an expected Republican victory in 2022 can bail them out, he may be surprised. Jim Jordan could find himself arrested.

As The Hill reports, Jordan went on Fox to speak with Brian Kilmeade—who happens to have also sent texts to the White House on Jan. 6, and might be facing his own request to testify—and explain that he has “concerns” about the select committee. In particular, he alleged that the committee has been “altering documents.”

“We're going to review the letter, but I gotta be honest with you. I got real concerns about any committee that will take a document and alter it and present it to the American people, completely mislead the American people like they did last week,” said Jordan.

That reference to “altering documents” apparently refers to how Adam Schiff read part of a Jordan text earlier in the week, rather than giving the whole thing. The portion that Schiff read was repeating a portion of the coup plot indicating that Mike Pence "should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all." Because Schiff didn’t read the full text, Jordan is accusing him of altering documents.

The full text doesn’t make this better. If anything, it shows how serious Jordan was about backing the planned coup.

“On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all—in accordance with guidance from founding father Alexander Hamilton and judicial precedence. ‘No legislative act,’  wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 78, ‘contrary to the Constitution, can be valid.’ The court in Hubbard v. Lowe reinforced this truth: ‘That an unconstitutional statute is not a law at all is a proposition no longer open to discussion.’ 226 F. 135, 137 (SDNY 1915), appeal dismissed, 242 U.S. 654 (1916).  Following this rationale, an unconstitutionally appointed elector, like an unconstitutionally enacted statute, is no elector at all.”

Nothing that Schiff omitted lessens the impact of what Jordan wrote in any way. In fact, the full text is much worse. The talk about “altering documents” is simply Jordan mulling an excuse not to appear—in this case, an excuse that was also regularly aired on Fox during Trump’s impeachment hearings.

But as MSNBC reports, Jordan might want to think twice about simply refusing to show up before the select committee. As one of six Republican representatives known to have worked directly with Trump and his campaign to overturn the outcome of the election, Jordan is of keen interest to the committee, and a key participant in events leading up to Jan. 6.

Rep. Scott Perry—who brought would-be attorney-general Jeffery Clark to the White House—has already refused to appear before the committee, If Jordan joins Perry in refusing to provide vital documents and testimony, the House could be entering unknown territory.

So what happens if Perry—or, for example, his fellow schemers Jordan and Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas—gets a subpoena? The short answer is that we don’t really know — there’s never been a situation like this before. “There is no established historical or legal precedent regarding congressional power to enforce subpoenas against members of Congress,” law professor Kimberly Wehle wrote in The Atlantic in August. “But if the bipartisan committee has to defend the subpoenas in federal court, it could make a strong argument that the Constitution allows a court to order compliance.”

Of course, Jordan, Perry, Gohmert, et. al, would be happy to join the long line of Republicans now facing court cases over subpoenas from the select committee. Stonewalling until the GOP rides in to save them on the back of an angry midterm is the bet they are all making. However, there is one thing that keeps getting mentioned, then carefully packed away again—the power of inherent contempt.

Congress’ ability to simply arrest someone directly, without going through a request to the DOJ and a long parade through the ladder of courts, hasn’t been trotted out in a long time. But a special case … could be a special case.

While the discussion is on on shakier ground with private citizens, the fact is that each house of Congress is explicitly allowed to make its own rules under the Constitution. It is also then allowed to enforce those rules as it sees fit, granting it the power of censure and expulsion. And courts have yet to rule on how long, say, a member of Congress could be held while defying a lawful subpoena.

The prospect that Jim Jordan will actually be locked up in some repurposed storeroom beneath the House chambers remains slim. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to start very visibly clearing out some space and testing some padlocks, just to make sure that Jordan, along with the other five Republicans at the top of the list, knows the possibility is still there.

If the Senate can be harangued for failing to end the filibuster even for the purpose of saving democracy, then the same pressure should be applied to the House when it comes to inherent contempt. No one likes the idea. That doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. 

With a three-pronged plan, Trump’s White House tried to topple our democracy

America has not yet internalized what the last Republican administration did, during the last months of Donald Trump's term of office. The country seems rather insistent on not letting the full scope of it drift into their heads, and every new detail seems to be presented with enough context stripped out to keep it vague.

The new release of Justice Department notes documenting conversations between Trump and his acting attorney general put things in very plain terms. From late December to the violent culmination of events on January 6, the Trump White House engaged in a multi-pronged effort to topple the United States government.

It was intentional. It was supported by top White House aides. It had the explicit goal of nullifying a U.S. presidential election so that the Trump White House could, acting in plain defiance of the rules set out in the Constitution, maintain power. That Trump and his top allies had spent the previous twelve months combing through government to remove those seen as insufficiently "loyal" to the White House's increasingly law-bending edicts may or may not have been precursor, but there's not even a little question about what happened in the last days of December and early days of January.

According to notes taken by deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue, Trump asked acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen to "just say that the election was corrupt," then "leave the rest" to the White House and to Republicans in Congress. (Specifically mentioned by Trump in that call was, among others, Rep. Jim Jordan, who is now scurrying to evade questions about his communications with Trump on the day of the January 6 insurrection.) It was not once or twice: the Trump White House is said to have contacted Rosen and other officials "nearly every day" to pressure the agency to publicly cast doubts on the election.

Trump and others within the White House, including chief of staff Mark Meadows, also began calling Republican election officials in at least Arizona and Georgia to similarly pressure them to alter their vote totals in Trump's favor.

In conjunction with both those efforts, Trump was encouraging members of his base to show up for a "march" on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, scheduled to exactly coincide with the formal congressional acknowledgement of the electoral totals. Trump and his allies sought to assemble as large a crowd as possible, for the specifically cited purpose of pressuring the assembled Congress to overturn the election's outcome.

When the crowd turned violent, Trump did nothing. When Republican lawmakers called him personally to ask him for aid, he belittled and refused them.

The justification for each act was a propaganda campaign by Republican allies that fraudulently claimed non-Republicans had "stolen" the election from the party. Many of those claims were invented out of conspiratorial nothing (from Italian satellite links to ballots with "bamboo" in the paper); others were spiraled out from panicked claims about a somebody who saw a somebody with a something. Each of the propaganda claims were so brazenly false that courtroom judges drop-kicked them out out of evidence near-immediately.

There is nothing that needs teasing out, here. The Trump White House plan was in full view. Donald Trump and his top allies engaged in a multi-pronged, extended, pre-plotted campaign to overthrow the next constitutionally appointed U.S. presidency by falsely claiming the election was invalid; by pressuring the Department of Justice to issue statements further casting doubt on the election's integrity; by calling key election officials and asking them to change reported vote totals on Trump's behalf; by using conspiratorial claims to gather a mob of enraged would-be "patriots" convinced that direct action was needed to "stop the steal" from happening; by asking that crowd to march the Capitol; by rebuffing efforts, during the mob's attack, to call off the now-violent mob.

It was an act of plain sedition, pre-planned and premeditated and orchestrated from inside Trump's own inner circle. It was backed by a majority of House Republicans, multiple of which were in communication with Trump and dozens of whom were allied with the effort to falsely dispute the election's results.

Donald Trump and his top aides engaged in a multipart plan to overthrow the United States government so as to retain power. Put that in your head and let it stew there, because there's simply no denying that it's true.

The new notes from the Department of Justice represent, by themselves, an act of official corruption easily besting Nixon's worst. Asking the Department of Justice to falsely cast doubts on the integrity of a U.S. election that booted you from power is by itself an act that would demand impeachment, if Senate Republicans were not themselves so corrupt as to have allied with the idea. Calling a Georgia election official to ask that official to "find" new votes is a demand that should yet land Trump in prison for a decade or longer. Pointedly ignoring lawmakers asking for assistance as his enraged allies broke through windows and sought out his enemies is the stuff of terrorism, not mere corruption.

It is the three-pronged plan that elevates Trump and his top Republican allies from merely corrupt to outright seditionists. It was a plan intended to erase a U.S. presidential election. It sought out allies in the Department of Justice who would publicly discredit the election, allies in state governments who would change the vote totals, and a public mob that would disrupt the vote count and intimidate public officials into approving a Trump return to power.

It was all one plan, not three. Discredit the election using false claims; use the same false claims to stoke a public anger deep enough to justify tossing out the rule of law, in the name of restoring "order."

It was an attempted fascist takeover, and many of its top orchestrators are still featured prominently on the Sunday news shows. Parts of it came very close to succeeding; had different Republican officials been in different offices, it seems quite possible now that Trump's White House could have found state or county allies willing to alter votes in the manner they were requested. Parts of it were seemingly asinine, inventions of deranged and desperate minds; one has a hard time believing that a congressional declaration that Trump was "somehow" still president would be treated as legitimate by the press, the military, or the public at large, if the declaration had come from lawmakers being literally held hostage by a mob demanding they do so.

It was still an attempt, though. Trump and others within the White House engaged in weeks of effort in attempts to enlist both accomplices within government and a paramilitary force outside it. Trump is a traitor to his country. Any outcome that does not see him rotting in prison for his acts will itself be an affront to our would-be democracy.