After conducting more than 1,000 interviews, collecting thousands of documents, and tangling with uncooperative Donald Trump allies, this week the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capitol riot will shift into a new phase, kicking off a series of eight primetime televised hearings.
For the first hearing on Thursday, June 9, the panel has promised new witness testimony, “previously unseen material,” and a summary of what it’s learned about the “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.” There will undoubtedly be some fireworks; while preparing its presentation the panel sought out top writers “to build a narrative thriller that compels audiences,” the Washington Post reported
Here are the wildest revelations so far.
Ginni Thomas repeatedly urged the White House to overturn the election.
From November 3, 2020 to January 6, 2021, just about every Republican official or operative with kooky ideas about thwarting the will of American voters was texting then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. Everyone from Ivanka Trump to My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell to Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene makes an appearance in the thousands of messages Meadows turned over to the January 6 committee, many of which were subsequently published by various outlets.
The most shocking Meadows texts came from Ginni Thomas, the longtime conservative activist who also happens to be the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. . . . The messages contain references to various false election fraud conspiracy theories, including some popular in QAnon circles.
Thomas also referenced a “conversation with my best friend just now” that soothed her fears that Trump’s election plot would fail. Ginni and Clarence Thomas are known to refer to each other as their “best friend,” but surely the justice would’ve recused himself from 2020-election-related cases if he knew his wife was advising Team Trump.
Don Jr. shared a plan for declaring dad the winner while votes were still being counted.
Two days after the 2020 election Donald Trump Jr. sent Meadows a text laying out strategies to ensure his father stayed in office regardless of who actually won, according to CNN. Team Trump went on to pursue the tactics he referenced, including filing lawsuits to challenge election results, demanding recounts, promoting bogus “alternate electors,” and blocking Congress’s certification of a Biden win on January 6, 2021.
It was fairly clear at this point that Trump intended to steal the election, as he’d been sowing the seeds for years and prematurely declared victory on Election Night. But the Don Jr. text is more evidence that this wasn’t just loose talk from the president; Trump’s inner circle had multi-pronged plan that they were working to implement before the election was called.
Sean Hannity literally took orders from the White House.
File under inconsequential but still highly embarrassing: on Election Day the Fox News host — who insists he’s an independent journalist not just a Trump stooge — asked Meadows for messaging instructions and responded with “yes sir.”
Trump was ready to seize voting machines.
Earlier this year, Representative Bennie Thompson, chairman of the January 6 committee, confirmed reports that Trump and his advisers pursued plans to seize voting machines after Election Day.
On December 18, 2020, four conspiracy theorists including former national security adviser Michael Flynn and lawyer Sidney Powell met with Trump, according to Axios. They urged him to have the Pentagon seize voting machines and appoint Powell as special counsel to investigate voter fraud. . . . In January, Politico published a never-issued draft executive order consistent with the Powell-Flynn plan.
Trump said maybe Pence should be hanged.
At least one witness told the House committee that Trump said he was in favor of the January 6 mob murdering his vice president, as the New York Times reported on May 25, 2022:
Shortly after hundreds of rioters at the Capitol started chanting “Hang Mike Pence!” on Jan. 6, 2021, the White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, left the dining room off the Oval Office, walked into his own office and told colleagues that President Donald J. Trump was complaining that the vice president was being whisked to safety. Mr. Meadows, according to an account provided to the House committee investigating Jan. 6, then told the colleagues that Mr. Trump had said something to the effect of, maybe Mr. Pence should be hanged.
Fox News hosts sent Meadows panicked texts during the Capitol riot.
Ahead of the January 6 panel’s unanimous vote to hold Meadows in contempt for refusing to comply with a subpoena to appear before the committee, Representative Liz Cheney read off some texts Fox News hosts sent to the chief of staff on January 6, 2021. Though the network’s stars later downplayed the insurrection on-air, as the Capitol riot was unfolding they were pleading with Meadows to make Trump put a stop to it.
“Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” Laura Ingraham texted. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”
Meadows burned sensitive documents in a White House fireplace.
Though it was overshadowed by Trump’s alleged endorsement of the “Hang Mike Pence!” chant, the same Times report said witnesses told the House panel that Mark Meadows “used the fireplace in his office to burn documents.” A few days later, Politico offered some more detail on the White House chief-of-staff’s (alleged) old-school evidence destruction method:
Then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows burned papers in his office after meeting with a House Republican who was working to challenge the 2020 election, according to testimony the Jan. 6 select committee has heard from one of his former aides.
Trump flushed sensitive documents down a White House toilet.
During his presidency, Trump demonstrated time and again that he has a true gift for doing weird stuff with paper. Thanks to the January 6 committee, in winter 2022 we got some more detail on his penchant for paper ripping. First, the Washington Post revealed that a good number of documents only made it to the January 6 committee thanks to the magic of Scotch tape:
Trump may have engaged in a “criminal conspiracy.”
In a March 2022 court filing, the January 6 committee argued that it should be able to enforce a subpoena against Trump’s lawyer John Eastman because the documents in question amount to notes on a criminal conspiracy.
“The Select Committee … has a good-faith basis for concluding that the President and members of his Campaign engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the panel wrote in in a legal brief.
Several weeks later, California federal district court judge David Carter ruled that Trump “more likely than not … corruptly attempted to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,” and that Trump and Eastman “more likely than not … dishonestly conspired to obstruct” the joint session. Eastman was ordered to turn over more than 100 emails to the panel. He complied, but is still fighting other committee requests in court.
[P]erhaps once the panel releases its full findings all the pre-hearing leaks will look tame by comparison.
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