Category: January6

Trump’s second impeachment is about more than you think

Posted on by Mark Sumner

When the House acted swiftly to impeach Donald Trump for a second time on Jan. 13, the actual Articles of Impeachment were shockingly brief. With just five pages, the first of which is completely taken up with the names of sponsors who signed onto the resolution, the gist of the single article is that Trump repeatedly issued false statements that inflamed the crowd and incited insurgents on Jan. 6. The statements cited in the resolution include Trump’s oft-repeated claim that “we won this election, and we won it by a landslide” and more aggressive statements like “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Those statements, which Trump repeated at the rally he held shortly before the insurgents swarmed up the steps of the Capitol, may seem scant. And arguments over whether they are really incitement to violence may seem to allow Republicans a lot of wiggle room when it comes to their vote. 

But the article is not everything that House members will be bringing to the Senate when they come for Trump’s trial on Feb. 8.

In addition to the article itself, there are considerably more detailed supporting documents. These documents don’t just cite the statements that Trump made on the morning of the assault on the Capitol, they cover the whole period following the election and show how Trump laid the groundwork for violence. That means that things like the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, and tweets that Trump put out threatening any officials who got in his way, are fully covered. 

The document also details events on Jan. 6, including statements by Rudy Giuliani urging the crowd to have “have trial by combat,” and Donald Trump, Jr. warning Congress that “we’re coming for you.” And it points out how, when Trump got up to speak, he called out specific legislators as targets for the crowd’s hate before falsely telling them that he was going to walk up Pennsylvania Ave. with them.

The document is far from comprehensive. It doesn’t contain a full list of the 62 legal actions filed by Trump’s team. It doesn’t cover all the changes Trump made at the Pentagon following the election. It doesn’t discuss the scheme to sub in a Devin Nunes aide as head of the CIA. It doesn’t cover Michael Flynn’s plan to implement “partial martial law” or DOJ attorney Jeffrey Clark’s scheme to use the Justice Department to interfere in counting the electoral vote. 

But there is more than enough in the provided documents to show that the crowd that pushed through police to hunt hostages in the halls of Congress wasn’t just inflamed by a few offhand words Trump delivered on that Wednesday morning. The insurgency was the result of weeks of incitement and of planning by both Trump and other members of his team. It was neither spontaneous nor an accident. It was an attempted coup.

And members of a failed coup should expect to pay a price.

Senate Republicans push to let Trump off the hook for inciting Capitol attack

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Republicans want to move along and forget that whole thing where a mob of Trump supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, threatening the lives of lawmakers and killing one police officer and wounding others. Donald Trump isn’t in office anymore, the senators who would have to vote in his impeachment trial say, so there’s nothing to talk about anymore.

We should move on from the 15 police officers hospitalized and more than 100 injured as Trump-supporting domestic terrorists beat them with fire extinguishers and American flags and fists and whatever else was available, shot bear spray at them, massed in the hundreds if not thousands to force their way through doors and beat down windows, and in one case Tasered an officer in the neck until he had a heart attack.

Rep. John Katko, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee and one of the 10 House Republicans who voted for impeachment, said after classified briefings on the attack, “I was left with a profound sense that it was much worse than people realized.”

But Senate Republicans are strenuously looking for excuses not to hold Trump accountable. Sen. John Cornyn spent Thursday morning quoting former Trump impeachment lawyer Alan Dershowitz to suggest that holding Trump to account for his significant role in whipping up the mob that attacked the Capitol would be merely “seek[ing] revenge” and would “distract from President Biden’s agenda, and make it hard to heal the country.” 

”What good comes from impeaching a guy in Florida?” Sen. Lindsey Graham asked. But he made clear to CNN that his concern was not about “what good” but about what’s good for the Republican Party, saying: “There's no way to be a successful Republican Party without having President Trump working with all of us and all of us working with him. That's just a fact. And I think we got a decent chance of coming back in 2022. But we can't do it without the President.”

Trump told these people to come to Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes that made Joe Biden the president. “Will be wild,” he tweeted. That day, he told the crowd “we’re going to have to fight much harder,” and, “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen.” Then, “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” And he told them he would be with them as they marched on the Capitol.

What good would come from impeaching him now that he’s a private citizen in Florida? You put a marker down that inciting violence against Congress specifically as it attempts to carry out the process of democracy is not acceptable. Do Cornyn or Graham treat a dirt-filled wound by slapping a bandage on it and pretending it’s not there? Because that’s a recipe for festering infection, just as refusing to address what happened at the Capitol, and Trump’s role in it, would worsen the already festering infection in U.S. politics. 

Republicans like Cornyn and Graham, though, don’t care about what’s good for the nation. They care about what’s good for the Republican Party.

QAnon congresswoman is really trying to get someone killed with her latest incitement

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Ten days after joining Congress, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene continues building the case for her removal from the House of Representatives. In the wake of the violent attack on the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump trying to keep Congress from formalizing his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, Greene tweeted out another incitement to violence.

“These Democrats are the enemies to the American people who are leading the impeachment witch hunt against President Trump,” Greene tweeted Wednesday. “AGAIN!”

Then, ominously, “They will be held accountable.”

Enemies to the American people who will be held accountable, huh? That sounds like a call to violence from a member of Congress who described Jan. 6 as a “1776 moment.” When you have spent months trying to overturn an election and then compared the day on which a violent attack on the Capitol was planned to the American Revolution, you don’t get the benefit of the doubt on “enemies of the people” who “will be held accountable.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is dangerous and she’s reveling in it. She’s positioning herself as some kind of brave freedom fighter, but she’s standing on the sidelines, in a position of privilege, egging others on to do her dirty work. She’s joined Trump in spending months working to convince his followers that the election was stolen—every single fact to the contrary—and now she’s trying to use that belief to get people killed. To get elected Democrats killed in a larger coup attempt.

She needs to go before (more) people are killed, not after.

Republican congresswoman just tweeted that Democrats are "enemies to the American people" and said, "They will be held accountable." That seems very...incitement-y. pic.twitter.com/Sj6o60zDhH

— Eric Umansky (@ericuman) January 13, 2021

Schumer to FBI: Put Capitol rioters on the no-fly list and prosecute them

Posted on by Laura Clawson

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer—soon to be the Senate majority leader—is calling for the domestic terrorists who attacked the Capitol to be added to the no-fly list. Schumer urged that move in a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray, additionally calling for the insurrectionists to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Videos of rioters learning they couldn't fly home have become popular online content after American Airlines banned some and others were blocked or removed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). 

As tempting as it is to think about these violent terrorists being banned from air travel, and as much as they should absolutely face consequences for their actions, there are serious problems with the no-fly list, as the ACLU has highlighted repeatedly over the years. For instance, “innocent, law-abiding Americans have found themselves subject to relentless hassles, interrogation and searches every time they try to travel by air.  They may share similar names with those who have been placed on suspect lists, or be the victims of random error, malicious discrimination, or mysterious bureaucratic quirks.” You don’t have to have any sympathy for these specific asshats to see the problems with such a system.

At the same time, flight attendants and other workers who have to deal with air travelers shouldn’t have to face the kind of abuse that Trumpists frequently deal out. “Acts against our democracy, our government and the freedom we claim as Americans must disqualify these individuals from the freedom of flight,” Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA) said in a statement following the attack on the Capitol.

Then again, if the people who stormed the Capitol were in prison, they couldn’t fly anyway.

Trump waited hours to tell his supporters to stop attacking the Capitol. There’s a reason for that

Posted on by Laura Clawson

On January 6, one prominent Republican after another called Donald Trump or the people near him, begging him to take decisive action to protect the U.S. Capitol from his mob of supporters, including by sending the message only he could effectively send convincing the mob to stand down. But Trump, transfixed by what he was watching on live television, didn’t respond for hours. In fact, early on, he tweeted an incitement to violence against Mike Pence. 

According to The Washington Post, Trump “didn’t appear to understand the magnitude of the crisis” and was “not initially receptive” to the idea that he needed to do something to tamp down the violence. Gee, why could that be? 

”He was hard to reach, and you know why? Because it was live TV,” according to one adviser. “If it’s TiVo, he just hits pause and takes the calls. If it’s live TV, he watches it, and he was just watching it all unfold.” That’s presumably why Fox News spent long stretches quoting a litany of Trump-supporting Republicans begging him to take action—in an attempt to get him to pay attention. But something else was going on here, and it needs to be said, and said again: Trump didn’t want the attack on the Capitol to stop. He was hoping it would succeed.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, who, trapped inside the Capitol, called Ivanka Trump to ask her to get her father to send a strong message to his supporters, urging them to go home. “It took him awhile to appreciate the gravity of the situation,” Graham told the Post. “The president saw these people as allies in his journey and sympathetic to the idea that the election was stolen.”

Despite knowing in a very personal way that Trump did not want to stop the domestic terrorists terrorizing Congress in his name, Graham is still opposing impeachment, because “It is past time for all of us to try to heal our country and move forward.” And to Republicans, the way to move forward is by emboldening the people who did this and letting them know there will be no consequences.

Trump did not want to tell his followers to back down, and at some point, responsible people have to say out loud that it was because he was waiting and hoping the terrorists would succeed in the coup they were attempting on his behalf. He’s a grown man. “He didn’t understand” cannot stand as an excuse for standing by while his supporters trashed the Capitol, threatened Congress to keep it from doing its constitutional duty, and killed a police officer. No matter how transfixing that live TV was, Trump was watching terrorism and violence, and didn’t want to put a stop to it.

Say it. Make the Republican members of Congress whose lives were at risk understand it, and understand that the way to get out from under the fear is not to cave and cave again but to make sure this terrorism doesn’t happen again. Donald Trump was willing to risk the lives of his supporters in Congress as he actively aimed a mob at Pence in retaliation for Pence once, in more than four years of subservience, saying no.

Members of the National Guard were seething in frustration as they watched the scene play out, waiting to be called in to protect the Capitol, and Trump’s Defense Department is trying to pass off responsibility—which should not be allowed to happen. The sergeants at arms of the House and Senate and the chief of the Capitol Police are all resigning over their failures. The Pentagon needs to undergo the same kind of house-cleaning for the willingness of its leaders to sit back and watch and say “not our responsibility.” There needs to be accountability everywhere. But one place most of all.

In the final analysis Trump is the first and most responsible—for spending months convincing his supporters the election was stolen, then for spending weeks building up the January 6 event, and, on the day itself, urging the crowd to march on the Capitol with rage as their guiding instinct. He rebuffed pleas from Ivanka and from his closest aides to do what he needed to do. Because doing the thing that was right and necessary was not in line with his goal: a successful coup.