Date: 2024-10-31 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00022759
US POLITICS
JANUARY 6TH
THE PLUM LINE ... Opinion A new Jan. 6 witness shows why Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet is lethal
JANUARY 6TH
THE PLUM LINE ... Opinion A new Jan. 6 witness shows why Trump’s 2:24 p.m. tweet is lethal
Former president Donald Trump speaks to supporters at a rally on April 2 near Washington, Mich. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)
Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/07/19/matthew-pottinger-jan-6-trump-tweet-pence/
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
The idea that a man like Donald Trump can have any political power whatsoever in a country as sophisticated as the United States is astonishing ... but sadly it happened and is not over yet.
Obviously there are weaknesses in almost any political system ... and democracy is no exception. I am surprised, however, at the inability of the country's political system to rid itself of someone like Trump being in a position of power and/or having pretty much full immunity from behaving in a quite despicable manner.
The idea that in the United States that everyone is equal in the eyes of the law is clearly a quite laughable concept ... and very sad that this is the reality.
Peter Burgess
By Greg Sargent ... Columnist ... Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.
July 19, 2022 at 11:59 a.m. EDT
This week, the House select committee on Jan. 6 will hold a prime-time hearing designed to demonstrate Donald Trump’s depraved and venal conduct as the violence raged on the day itself. If you wanted to boil down the significance of this into two sentences, here’s one way you might do it:
- During his final days as president, Donald Trump launched an extraordinarily corrupt effort to persuade his vice president, Mike Pence, to abuse his official duty in order to help Trump cling to power illegitimately and probably illegally.
- When that pressure campaign failed, Trump turned to a violent mob as the weapon that might finish the job for him.
A new witness is set to testify publicly at Thursday’s hearing: former deputy national security adviser Matthew Pottinger, who resigned on Jan. 6. In videotaped testimony, Pottinger told the committee that he stepped down after Trump tweeted another attack on Pence at 2:24 p.m., as the violence raged.
That 2:24 tweet represents a key moment, when the procedural coup and the mob violence became one and the same story. In it, Trump ripped Pence for lacking the “courage” to delay the congressional count of presidential electors, suggesting this would have allowed states to revisit the voting and appoint electors for Trump, which was his underlying coup scheme.
Let’s put this plainly: Many of the people around Trump understood perfectly what his intent was when he sent that tweet. In their apparent understanding of the moment, Trump was directing the mob to intimidate Pence into helping carry out the potentially illegal overthrow of an incoming, legitimately elected government.
Numerous people around Trump saw this as a breaking point. Pottinger told the committee that “I read that tweet and made a decision at that moment to resign.”
Indeed, as journalist Jonathan Karl reports in his book, as all that unfolded, Pottinger was “shocked” and “horrified.” If and when Pottinger repeats this in live testimony, it should be powerful.
That tweet was also the threshold moment for Cassidy Hutchinson, the former top aide to Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. She testified that she found it “un-American” and was “disgusted,” precisely because of what was going on around Trump at that moment.
Which is really the rub of the matter. As Hutchinson also testified, moments earlier, as the mob converged on the Capitol, Trump’s White House counsel Pat Cipollone had urgently warned that something must be done to call off the mob, or people would die and there would be blood on the hands of Trump and his inner circle.
And even as rioters chanted “Hang Mike Pence,” Hutchinson testified, Meadows suggested that Trump thought he “deserved” to hang. All of this means Trump and his inner circle knew full well that the violence was surging out of control when Trump harangued the mob one more time to target Pence.
Trump also refrained from calling off the attackers for hours. To what degree can it be demonstrated that he wasn’t merely a sore loser who enjoyed seeing his supporters fight for him, but, rather, that he wanted and even directed the mob to terrorize Pence for his betrayal, or intimidate him into doing Trump’s bidding, or both?
All this could have legal significance as well. As former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade suggests in an interview, Trump’s tweet attacking Pence already provides some evidence that he deliberately weaponized the crowd to finish the job of disrupting the electoral count in Congress.
“If prosecutors can establish Trump’s intent to do so, then this could bolster charges of obstruction of an official proceeding,” McQuade told me. She added that this could conceivably “support charges of seditious conspiracy, which requires an agreement to use force to oppose the execution of federal law.”
In such an understanding, it would be shown that Trump consciously used the violence itself to disrupt the election’s lawful conclusion. We don’t know whether this will be legally demonstrable, but the committee is plainly trying to get as close to this as possible.
Strangely, even as this is happening, Trump appears closer than ever to announcing a 2024 presidential run. That could be possible only given this fact: For the vast majority of elected Republicans and party leaders, deliberately standing by to enable a violent insurrection to unfold — or even perhaps actively encouraging it — simply isn’t disqualifying.
The only remaining question is whether the rest of us will find a way to impose accountability for it.
Opinion by Greg Sargent ... Greg Sargent writes The Plum Line blog. He joined The Post in 2010, after stints at Talking Points Memo, New York Magazine and the New York Observer.