HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 14, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today the White House announced that President Joe Biden will visit the Middle East next month. His first stop will be in Israel, and then he will go to Saudi Arabia, where he will meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the man responsible for the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. MBS recently invested $2 billion in Jared Kushner’s new investment fund against the advice of the funds’ advisors.
In 2019, Biden promised to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” in part because of the Khashoggi killing, but administration officials have been quietly visiting for months, in part to urge Saudi Arabia to increase oil production to help ease gas prices in the U.S. While the White House maintains that it is looking for a “reset” with the Saudis in order to promote peace talks between Israel and Palestine, end the war in Yemen, and address human rights violations, it acknowledges that oil production is on the table.
Inflation is high in the U.S., as it is all over the world, because of demand, supply chain problems, the soaring costs of transportation as the world’s few carriers jack up prices, and so on. But that inflation is driven in large part by higher oil prices, which have driven up the price of gasoline and diesel in the U.S., which in turn makes everything more expensive.
Since the first public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol last week, much of the traffic on right-wing social media has been about gas prices, blaming them on President Biden. Republicans see gas prices and inflation as key issues both to distract from the hearings and to enable Republicans to take over control of Congress in the November midterm elections.
In fact, according to a piece by E. Rosalie in the newsletter Hoaxlines, U.S. production of crude oil during Biden’s first year was actually higher than it was in Trump’s first year. To encourage production, Biden’s officials have issued more permits on federal lands than were issued in the Trump administration’s first three years, at a pace that approaches that of George W. Bush’s administration. Only 10% of all U.S. drilling takes place on federal land, but the Bureau of Land Management confirms that more than 9000 drilling permits on public land are currently approved. Not all would be productive if they were developed, and none of them could start producing immediately, but this undercuts the argument that gas prices are high because the Biden administration has choked off permits.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has also driven up global oil prices, but the U.S. gets less than 2% of its oil from Russia.
What appears to be driving U.S. gas prices is the pressure investors are putting on oil companies, whose officers answer to their investors. Limited production creates higher prices that are driving record profits. In a March 2022 survey of 141 U.S. oil producers asking them why they were holding back production, 59% said they were under investor pressure. Only 6% blamed “government regulations” for their lack of increased production.
Oil companies are seeing huge profits and are using the money for stock buybacks to raise stock prices. BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, TotalEnergies, Eni, and Equinor will give between $38 and $41 billion to shareholders through buyback programs this year. As EOG Resources wrote to its shareholders: “2021 was a record-setting year for EOG. We earned record net income of $4.7 billion, generated a record $5.5 billion of free cash flow, which funded record cash return of $2.7 billion to shareholders. We doubled our regular dividend rate and paid two special dividends, paying out about 30% of cash from operations…. This period of high oil prices allows us to further bolster the balance sheet. To support our renewed $5 billion buyback authorization and prepare to take advantage of other countercyclical opportunities, we plan to build and carry a higher cash balance going forward….”
But congressional Republicans appear uninterested in adjusting the disjunction between supply and demand that is creating such high consumer prices. In May the House passed the Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act by a vote of 217 to 207 with only Democrats in the yes column and all Republicans and four Democrats voting no. The bill provided a vague warning that it is unlawful to charge “unconscionably excessive” prices for consumer fuel during presidentially declared energy emergencies, and it gave the Federal Trade Commission more power to punish price gouging.
The Senate has not moved forward with the bill. Republicans there can kill it with the filibuster and will do so, despite the fact that a Morning Consult/Politico poll shows that 77% of registered voters—including 76% of Republicans—like such a measure. Only 13% of voters outright oppose such a law (10% have no opinion).
Biden has sought to address the issue with the tools at his command. After trying to ease pressure by releasing oil from the strategic reserve, he has set out to reduce the nation’s demand for oil products by identifying the conversion to clean energy as a national security issue. On June 6 he vowed to “continue…pushing Congress to pass clean energy investments and tax cuts” but also authorized the use of the Defense Production Act to speed up the domestic production of solar panel parts, building insulation, heat pumps, and power grid infrastructure like transformers. He will also lower tariffs on solar technology coming to the U.S. from Southeast Asia for two years. These measures should ensure a reliable supply of solar panels while creating more jobs in the green energy sector, which currently employs more than 230,000 people in the solar industry alone.
In addition to Biden’s measures to ease oil prices, lawmakers are trying to curb inflation by imposing the sorts of limits on carrier prices that they refuse to on oil prices.
On Monday the House passed the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 to hamper unfair business practices among shipping carriers. The measure passed the Senate in March. Although the bills were introduced by Democrats, the votes that passed them were bipartisan, reflecting, perhaps, that the nine shipping companies that dominate the world market are multinational rather than domestic. According to Representative John Garamendi (D-CA), shippers have raised prices on U.S. businesses and consumers by more than 1000% on goods coming from Asia, enabling them to make $190 billion in profits last year, a sevenfold increase in one year. This bill, he said, “will help crush inflation and protect American jobs.” Biden has praised the bill and promises to sign it.
And tomorrow the Federal Reserve is expected to announce an interest rate hike of three quarters of a percentage point, its highest since 1994, to combat inflation. Higher interest rates will make it more expensive to borrow money, which should cool down the economy, although getting inflation down to the 2% the Fed prefers will likely slow consumer spending, dampen wage increases, and slow economic growth.
And of course, next month, Biden will visit the Saudis, who can increase oil supplies quickly if they believe it is in their best interest to do so.
And finally, a heads up: tomorrow’s hearing of the January 6 committee has been postponed. The next hearing is now scheduled for Thursday at 1:00 pm.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 15, 2022 (Wednesday)

In a letter to Georgia Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) this morning, the chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Bennie Thompson (D-MS), dropped information, images, and video showing that Loudermilk had led individuals through the U.S. Capitol complex on January 5, 2021, in what sure looks like a reconnaissance tour.
Thompson wrote that the committee had reviewed surveillance video, social media activity, and witness accounts and understood that Loudermilk led approximately 10 people “to areas in the Rayburn, Longworth, and Cannon House Office Buildings, as well as the entrances to tunnels leading to the U.S. Capitol,” on January 5, “despite the complex being closed to the public on that day.” The group “stayed for several hours.” “Individuals on the tour photographed and recorded areas of the complex not typically of interest to tourists, including hallways, staircases, and security checkpoints…. Their behavior…raises concerns about their activity and intent while inside the Capitol complex.”
The letter went on to note that some of the people Loudermilk showed around the complex attended the January 6 rally at the Ellipse and that some of them joined the unpermitted march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. It quotes a video one of them made of the march, saying: “There’s no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler. We’re coming for you…. They got it surrounded. It’s all the way up there on the hill, and it’s all the way around, and they’re coming in, coming in like white on rice for Pelosi, Nadler, even you, AOC. We’re coming to take you out and pull you out….”
The letter noted—somewhat dryly, I have to say—that the information it has “raises questions the Select Committee must answer.” There have been accounts of surveillance tours since immediately after January 6, when Democratic members of Congress claimed to have seen them, and 34 Democrats led by Representative Mikie Sherrill (D-NJ) wrote to Capitol Police asking them to investigate. Republicans, though, insisted that was inaccurate, saying that “There were no tours, no large groups, no one with MAGA hats on. There’s nothing in there remotely fitting the depiction in Mikie Sherrill’s letter.”
Now there is video and photographic evidence of just such a tour—even including someone in a MAGA hat—as well as a report that the committee has talked to the man to whom Thompson referred in his letter. This opens up a whole new can of congressional worms.
On May 19 the committee had asked Loudermilk to come in and review the evidence it had. He refused.
On Monday, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger wrote a letter to Representative Rodney Davis, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee, a committee on which Loudermilk sits. Manger wrote that surveillance video showed Loudermilk with a group of approximately 12 people that later grew to 15, but that “[t]here is no evidence that Representative Loudermilk entered the U.S. Capitol with this group on January 5, 2021,” nor did the group with Loudermilk "appear in any tunnels that would lead them to the US Capitol." “We train our officers on being alert for people conducting surveillance or reconnaissance,” Manger wrote, “and we do not consider any of the activities we observed as suspicious."
Yesterday, Loudermilk chimed in: “The truth will always prevail. As I’ve said since the Jan. 6 Committee made their baseless accusation about me to the media, I never gave a tour of the Capitol on Jan 5, 2021… and a small group visiting their congressman is in no way a suspicious activity. Now the Capitol Police have confirmed this fact.”
Now that we have the video evidence, the statements by Manger and Loudermilk illustrate exactly how someone can misdirect an observer without directly lying. In fact, Thompson’s letter supports Manger’s claim that neither the group nor Loudermilk were in the tunnels themselves. They were photographing the entrances, checkpoints, and staircases used by members of Congress. But the misdirection worked: The AP News headline covering Manger’s letter read: “Police: Republican’s tour of Capitol complex not suspicious.”
And Loudermilk has parsed the term “U.S. Capitol” to mean just that one building, not the entire complex, although we know that there was a plan afoot to take over many of the buildings in the complex, not just the one where Congress meets in session.
Ironically, the conspirators appeared to see their plan to overturn the election and install Republican Donald Trump in the presidency as some sort of a replay of the events of 1776. In a court filing today by a Proud Boy, Zachary Rehl, an exhibit included the “1776 Returns” document that showed up in a conversation between Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and an unknown person. After sending Tarrio the document, the individual apparently said “The revolution is more important than anything,” and Tarrio responded: “That’s what every waking moment consists of…. I’m not playing games.”
Now public, the document lays out a plan “[t]o maintain control over a select few, but crucial buildings in the DC area for a set period of time, presenting our demands in unity…. We must show our politicians We the People are in charge.” Those buildings included the Russell Senate Office Building, the Dirksen Senate Office Building, the Supreme Court, the Hart Senate Office Building, the Cannon House Office Building, the Longworth House Office Building, the Rayburn House Office Building, and “CNN—at least egg doorway.”
Their demands were stated as “a free and fair election” to be held on January 20, 2021, Inauguration Day, with paper ballots, no electronic voting, no mail-in ballots, no absentee ballots, IDs required for all, and monitored by the National Guard. “You are the revolution,” the document said. “Be a part of history & fight for this country so our children don’t have to. It’s all or nothing Patriots, boldness and bravery is necessary.”
“Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy, Mike Pence & Bill Gates, We the people are watching you,” it said. “Rand Paul & Ron DeSantis, We the people love you.”
Although we have now heard evidence from Trump’s attorney general William Barr, campaign manager Bill Stepien, White House lawyers, and even his own daughter, testifying under oath, that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen—and that such claims were at least in part a way to cheat small donors out of $250 million—insisting on the Big Lie has become a requirement for Republican candidates. Yesterday, Amy Gardner and Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post laid out how more than 100 of the Republicans who have won primaries have signed on to the Big Lie, including eight candidates for the U.S. Senate, eighty-six House candidates, five candidates for governor, four for state attorney general, and one for secretary of state.
When the forcible attempt to overthrow our government failed, the Republicans turned instead to taking over the machinery of elections, arranging election boards and reporting in such a way that Republicans could simply refuse to recognize that Democrats had been elected. This scenario played out last night in New Mexico, when the three-person Otero County commission refused to certify the results of the June 7 primary because they claimed not to trust the voting machines, which are made by the same company Trump and his cronies falsely accused of switching votes, an accusation thoroughly debunked now, under oath, by Trump’s own inner circle.
One of the commissioners, Couy Griffin, is a co-founder of Cowboys for Trump, said in 2020 that “the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,” and continues to believe that Trump won in 2020. He was at the Capitol on January 6 and will be sentenced this Friday for trespassing there. Another blamed the machines for her unwillingness to sign off on the results of the election: “[I]n my heart I don’t know if it is right,” she said. New Mexico’s secretary of state Maggie Toulouse Oliver, a Democrat, asked the court to order the board to certify the election results, and today, New Mexico’s supreme court did so.
For all that the insurrectionists fancy themselves acting like American Revolutionaries, they have the meaning of our nation’s founding exactly backwards. They tried to overturn the will of the American people to put Democrat Joe Biden in the office of the presidency, a will demonstrated by giving Biden a majority of more than 7 million votes and a majority of 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. In 1776, the Founders of what would later become the United States of America issued a declaration explicitly rejecting the idea that a government could be imposed on a majority by a minority and still be legitimate.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” the Declaration said. And it went on with another self-evident truth: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 16, 2022 (Thursday)

On CNN this morning, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, said: “New evidence is breaking every single day now. Suddenly, a lot of people want to tell the truth.”
After the committee’s third public hearing today, we can see why. The window for getting onto the good side of the investigation by cooperating with it is closing, and the story the congress members are laying out makes it clear that those sticking with Trump are quite likely in legal trouble.
It appears that the former president thinks the same thing. Before today’s hearing, he wrote: “I DEMAND EQUAL TIME!!!”
But it seems unlikely Trump wants to tell his version of what happened around January 6 under oath, and if he were misled by his advisors, who can doubt that he would already have thrown them under the bus?
And, so far, the committee has used testimony and evidence only from those high up in Trump’s own administration. Today was no exception. The committee covered the former president’s pressure campaign against his vice president, Mike Pence, to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Instead of following the law, codified in the 1887 Electoral Count Act, Trump wanted Pence to use his role as the person charged with opening electoral votes to throw out the votes that gave Democrat Joe Biden victory, or at least to recess the joint session of Congress for ten days to send the electoral slates back to the states, where pro-Trump legislatures could throw out the decision of the voters and resubmit slates for Trump.
In interviews with Pence’s former counsel Greg Jacob, as well as retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig, formerly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, the committee established that this plan, advanced by lawyer John Eastman, was illegal. Indeed, Eastman himself called it illegal, first at length in October 2020, and then in both written and verbal admissions after the election. And the committee established that Eastman, as well as others, told Trump the plan was illegal.
The hearings today hammered home that the centerpiece of our government is that the people have the right to choose their leaders. That concept is central to the rule of law. And yet, Trump embraced an illegal and unconstitutional theory that, instead, the vice president—one man—could overrule the will of the people and choose the president himself. Such a theory is utterly contrary to everything the Framers of the Constitution stood for and wrote into our fundamental law.
And yet, by early December 2020, after their legal challenges to the election had all failed, Trump’s people began to say that Pence could throw out the electoral slates that states had certified for Biden, or could send those certified electoral slates back to the states for reconsideration so that Republican-dominated legislatures could then submit new slates for Trump. Judge Luttig hammered home that there is nothing in either legal precedent or historical precedent that gave any validation to the idea that one man could determine the outcome of the election.
Still, on December 13, the day before the Electoral College met, lawyer Kenneth Chesebro wrote to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani arguing that Pence could refuse to count the votes from states that had “alternative” electors (we also know that he wrote about this idea for the first time on November 18, so that might have been the chatter Pence was hearing). At the time, the scheme to create second slates of electors was underway.
Eastman then took up the cause, saying that seven states had submitted “dual” slates of electors. When Jacob dismissed that claim, Eastman just said that Pence could just call them disputed anyway and throw the votes from those states out. Luttig reiterated that these fake electors had no legal authority whatsoever and that there is no historical or legal precedent at all to support the idea that the vice president could count alternative electoral slates to the ones certified by the states.
Both Pence’s counsel Jacobs and his chief of staff Marc Short believed that Eastman’s plan was bananas, and an avalanche of White House advisors agreed. According to today’s testimony, those agreeing included Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Trump lawyer Eric Herschmann, and Trump advisor Jason Miller, who testified that people thought “Eastman was crazy.” Herschmann testified that even Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani agreed on the morning of January 6 that Eastman’s argument wouldn’t stand up in court.
Nonetheless, Giuliani went out in front of the crowd at the Ellipse on January 6, insisted that the theory was correct, and lied that even Thomas Jefferson himself had used it.
Meanwhile, beginning in December, Trump had been pressuring Pence to go along with the scheme. Pence had refused, but Trump kept piling on the pressure. At rallies in early January, he kept hammering on the idea that Pence could deliver the election to Trump, and in meetings on January 4 and 5, he kept demanding that Pence overturn the election. When Pence continued to refuse, Trump appeared to try to lock him in by tweeting on January 5 that he and Pence were “in total agreement” that Pence could act to change the outcome of the election.
By then, Short was so worried about what Trump might do on January 6 that he told the Secret Service he was concerned about Pence’s safety.
On January 6, Trump called Pence on the phone and, according to witnesses, called him a “wimp” and a “p*ssy.” Pence then issued a statement saying it was his “considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.” Trump then went before the crowd at the Ellipse and added to his prepared speech sections attacking Pence.
After Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told him that violence had broken out at the Capitol, Trump tweeted that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done,” and violence ratcheted up. The committee showed rioters claiming they were there because Pence had let them down. “Pence betrayed us…the president mentioned it like 5 times when he talked,” one said. That 2:24 tweet was “pouring gasoline on the fire,” one White House press member told the committee. At 2:26, Pence and his family were evacuated to a secure location, where he would stay for more than four hours. The rioters missed the vice president by about 40 feet. A Proud Boy told the committee that if they had found Pence, they would have killed him.
Even after the crisis ended, Eastman continued to write to Pence’s people asking him to send the electoral slates back to the states. Herschmann advised him to “get a great effing criminal defense lawyer. You're going to need it.” Eastman then put in writing that he wanted a presidential pardon: “I’ve decided I should be on the pardon list,” he wrote. When he did not get a pardon, he took the Fifth Amendment before the committee, asserting his right against self-incrimination more than 100 times.
There were lots of places where Pence and his team were no heroes. They could have warned any number of people about what Trump was up to long before January 6, and Pence’s apparently noble stance was undoubtedly informed by a realization that if Pence did as Trump asked and it went wrong—even Eastman acknowledged the scheme was illegal—Pence would be the one holding the bag.
But the committee left all that unsaid. Instead, it went out of its way to make a very clear distinction between Trump, who was out for himself and damn the country, and Pence, who risked his own safety to follow the law. Indeed, that theme was so clear it appeared to have been carefully scripted. Today’s testimony highlighted the principles of Jacob and Short and their boss, Mike Pence. It even took a deliberate detour to let both Jacob and Short talk about how their Christian faith helped them to stand against Trump and do what was right, an aside that seemed designed to appeal to the evangelicals supporting Trump. And it highlighted how Pence continued to do the work of governing even while he was in the secure location, which looked much like a loading dock according to new photos shown today.
The committee seems to be presenting a clear choice to Republicans: stand with Trump, a man without honor who is quite possibly looking at criminal indictments and who is trying to destroy our democracy, or stand with Pence, who embraces the same economic and social ideology that Republicans claim to, without wanting to destroy our democracy.
The appearance of Judge Luttig today was in keeping with this theme. Luttig is such a giant in conservative legal circles that he was talked of for the Supreme Court in place of Samuel Alito, and his words bear extraordinary weight. Luttig hammered home that Trump’s scheme was an attempt to overturn the rule of law and to destroy our democracy. And, he warned, the danger is not over. Trump and his supporters remain “a clear and present danger to American democracy.”
Luttig’s testimony was powerful, but even more extraordinary was a statement he released before today’s hearing. Luttig, for whom both Eastman and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) clerked, warned that “January 6 was…a war for America’s democracy, a war irresponsibly instigated and prosecuted by the former president, his political party allies, and his supporters.”
That is, Luttig laid the responsibility for today’s national crisis at the door of the Trump wing of the Republican Party. He went on to warn that only it could reject the attempt of the president and his supporters to undermine the faith in our elections that underpins our democracy: “[O]nly the party that instigated this war over our democracy can bring an end to that war…. These senseless wars…were conceived and instigated from our Nation’s Capital by our own political leaders…and they have been cynically prosecuted by them to fever pitch, now to the point that they have recklessly put America herself at stake.”
Luttig urged Americans to remember that the fate of our democracy is in our hands and to reject the fever dreams of the Trump Republicans in favor of “a new vision, new truths, new values, new principles, new beliefs, new hopes and dreams that hopefully could once again bind our divided nation together into the more perfect union that ‘We the People’ originally ordained and established it to be.”
“The time has come,” Luttig wrote, “for us to decide whether we allow this war over our democracy to be prosecuted to its catastrophic end or whether we ourselves demand the immediate suspension of this war and insist on peace instead. We must make this decision because our political leaders are unwilling and unable, even as they recklessly prosecute this war in our name.”
Chair Bennie Thompson closed today’s hearing by asking anyone who might be on the fence about cooperating with the committee’s investigation, please to reach out.

clear and present danger

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 17, 2022 (Friday)

Early in the morning on June 17, 1972, Frank Wills, a 24-year-old security guard at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., noticed that a door lock had been taped open. He ripped off the tape and closed the door, but when he went on the next round, he found the door taped open again. He called the police, who found five burglars in the Democratic National Committee headquarters located in the building.
And so it began.
The U.S. president, Richard M. Nixon, was obsessed with the idea that opponents were trying to sink his campaign for reelection. The previous year, in June 1971, the New York Times had begun to publish what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a secret government study that detailed U.S. involvement in Vietnam from presidents Harry Truman to Lyndon Johnson. While the study ended before the Nixon administration, it showed that presidents had lied to the American people, and Nixon worried that the story would hurt his administration by souring the public on his approach to the Vietnam War. Worse, if anyone leaked similar information about his own administration—and there was plenty to leak—it would destroy his reelection campaign.
To stop his enemies, Nixon put together in the White House a special investigations unit to stop leaks. And who stops leaks? Plumbers.
These operatives burglarized the office of the psychiatrist who worked with the man who had leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg, to find damaging information about him. They sabotaged opponents by “ratf*cking” them, as they called it, planting fake letters in newspapers, hiring vendors for Democratic rallies and then running out on the unpaid bills, planting spies in Democrats’ campaigns and, finally, wiretapping.
On June 17, 1972, they tried to tap the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s fashionable Watergate complex.
The White House denied all knowledge of what it called a “third-rate burglary attempt,” and most of the press took the denial at face value. But two young reporters for the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the sloppy money trail behind the burglars directly to the White House.
The fallout from the burglary gained no traction before the election, which Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew won with an astonishing 60.7 percent of the vote. They took 520 electoral votes—49 states—while the Democratic nominees, South Dakota senator George McGovern and former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, won only 37.5% of the popular vote and the electoral votes of only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.
But in March 1973, one of the burglars, James W. McCord, Jr., wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica before his sentencing, saying that he had lied at his trial, under pressure to protect government officials. McCord had been the head of security for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President, known as CREEP. Sirica was known for his stiff sentences—reporters called him “Maximum John”—and later said, “I had no intention of sitting on the bench like a nincompoop and watching the parade go by.”
Sirica made the letter public, and White House counsel John Dean promptly began cooperating with prosecutors. In April, three of Nixon’s top advisors resigned, and in May the president was forced to appoint Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor to investigate the affair.
That same month, the Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, informally known as the Senate Watergate Committee, began nationally televised hearings. The committee’s chair was Sam Ervin (D-NC), a conservative Democrat who would not run for reelection in 1974 and thus was expected to be able to do the job without political grandstanding.
The hearings turned up the explosive testimony of John Dean, who said he had talked to Nixon about covering up the burglary more than 30 times, but there the investigation sat during the hot summer of 1973 as the committee churned through witnesses. And then, on July 13, 1973, deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield revealed that conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office had been taped since 1971.
The fat was in the fire.
Nixon refused to provide copies of the tapes either to Cox or to the Senate committee. When Cox subpoenaed a number of the tapes, Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire him. In the October 20, 1973, “Saturday Night Massacre,” Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckleshaus, refused to execute Nixon’s order and resigned in protest; it was only the third man at the Justice Department—Solicitor General Robert Bork—who was willing to carry out the order firing Cox.
Popular outrage at the resignations and firing forced Nixon to ask Bork—now acting attorney general—to appoint a new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a Democrat who had voted for Nixon, on November 1. On November 17, Nixon assured the American people that “I am not a crook.”
Like Cox before him, Jaworski was determined to hear the Oval Office tapes. He subpoenaed a number of them, and Nixon fought the subpoenas on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 24, 1974, in U.S. v. Nixon, the Supreme Court sided unanimously with the prosecutor, saying that executive privilege “must be considered in light of our historic commitment to the rule of law. This is nowhere more profoundly manifest than in our view that 'the twofold aim (of criminal justice) is that guilt shall not escape or innocence suffer.'... The very integrity of the judicial system and public confidence in the system depend on full disclosure of all the facts….”
Their hand forced, Nixon’s people released transcripts of the tapes. They were damning, not just in content but also in style. Nixon had cultivated an image of himself as a clean family man, and the tapes revealed a mean-spirited, foul-mouthed bully. Aware that the tapes would damage his image, Nixon had his swearing redacted. “[Expletive deleted]” trended.
In late July 1974, the House Committee on the Judiciary passed articles of impeachment, charging the president with obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Each article ended with the same statement: “In all of this, Richard M. Nixon has acted in a manner contrary to his trust as President and subversive of constitutional government, to the great prejudice of the cause of law and justice and to the manifest injury of the people of the United States. Wherefore Richard M. Nixon, by such conduct, warrants impeachment and trial, and removal from office.”
Still, Nixon insisted he was not guilty, saying he did not know his people were committing crimes on his watch. Then in early August a new tape, recorded days after the Watergate break-in, revealed Nixon and an aide plotting to invoke national security to protect the president. Even Republican senators, who had not wanted to convict their president, knew the game was over. A delegation went to the White House to deliver the news.
On August 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president in American history to resign.
Rather than admit guilt, though, he told the American people he had to step down because he no longer had the support he needed in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed the press, whose “leaks and accusations and innuendo” had been designed to destroy him. His disappointed supporters embraced the idea that there was a “liberal” conspiracy, spearheaded by the press, to bring down any Republican president.
When his replacement, Gerald Ford, issued a preemptive blanket pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States, he guaranteed that Nixon would never have to account for his illegal attempt to undermine his Democratic opponent, and that those who thought like Nixon could come to think they were above the law.
“What I admire about Nixon was his resilience,” one of Nixon’s 1972 operatives told a reporter decades later, “It’s attack, attack, attack.” That operative, who sports a tattoo of Nixon on his back, was Roger Stone, who went on to advise Donald Trump’s political career.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 18, 2022 (Saturday)

Of all we have heard at the hearings of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, Judge J. Michael Luttig’s testimony on Thursday stands out. Luttig is a leading conservative thinker, a giant in Republican legal circles, who worked in the Reagan administration, was appointed by President George H. W. Bush to a federal judgeship, and was on the short-list for a Supreme Court seat during President George W. Bush’s term. In January 2021, then–vice president Mike Pence’s staff turned to him for support to make sure Pence didn’t agree to count out electors; Luttig opposed the scheme absolutely.
Luttig’s words carry weight among Republican lawmakers.
On Thursday, Judge Luttig examined the ongoing danger to democracy and located it not just on former president Donald Trump and his enablers, but on the entire Republican Party of today, the party that embraces the Big Lie that Trump won the 2020 election, the party that continues to plan to overturn any election in which voters choose a Democrat.
“[T]he former president and his party are today a clear and present danger for American democracy,” Luttig reiterated to NPR’s All Things Considered.
And, as if in confirmation, delegates to a convention of the Texas Republican Party today approved platform planks rejecting “the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and [holding] that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States”; requiring students “to learn about the dignity of the preborn human,” including that life begins at fertilization; treating homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice”; locking the number of Supreme Court justices at 9; getting rid of the constitutional power to levy income taxes; abolishing the Federal Reserve; rejecting the Equal Rights Amendment; returning Christianity to schools and government; ending all gun safety measures; abolishing the Department of Education; arming teachers; requiring colleges to teach “free-market liberty principles”; defending capital punishment; dictating the ways in which the events at the Alamo are remembered; protecting Confederate monuments; ending gay marriage; withdrawing from the United Nations and the World Health Organization; and calling for a vote “for the people of Texas to determine whether or not the State of Texas should reassert its status as an independent nation.”
Luttig said that Republicans must start speaking to Democrats as ”fellow Americans that have a shared destiny and shared hopes and dreams for America.” “We cannot have in America either political party behaving itself like the Republican Party has since the 2020 election.”
I’ve been thinking a lot since Thursday of Luttig’s clear-eyed view of the dangers we face in this country today, and of his willingness to cast aside old political loyalties to call them out in order to protect our democracy. They remind me of nothing so much as Abraham Lincoln’s description of the way northerners reacted to the 1854 passage of a law permitting the spread of enslavement into western lands from which it had previously been excluded. The passage of that law woke up Americans who had not been paying attention, and convinced them to work across old political lines to stop oligarchs from destroying democracy. Northerners were “thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher's cleaver” to push back against the oligarchic enslavers, Lincoln later said. Regardless of where they started politically, they stood up for democracy together. And while they came from different parties, he said, they were “still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.”
Over the course of the next decade, that new coalition argued and struggled and took the nation in an entirely new direction. It fought and won a war that involved more than two million men and cost more than $5 billion, established our first national money, welcomed immigrants, created public colleges, invented the income tax, gave farmers land, built transcontinental railroads, and—finally—ended human enslavement in the U.S. except as punishment for a crime for which a person had been duly convicted.
And, of course, it saved the nation from those seeking to destroy it.
“[T]o my knowledge, I’ve never spoken publicly a single word of politics,” Luttig told NPR about his extraordinary statements. In a later note he added: “I wanted to do this for America and I understood I had an obligation to do it for America. It was my ‘moment’ in my life to stand up, step forward, and bear witness to what I believe and what I do not believe.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 19, 2022 (Sunday)

Tomorrow is the federal holiday honoring Juneteenth, the celebration of the announcement on June 19th, 1865, in Texas that enslaved Americans were free.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee had surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the U.S. Army, but it was not until June 2 that General Edmund Kirby Smith surrendered the Confederacy’s Trans-Mississippi Department, the last major army of the Confederacy, to the United States, in Galveston, Texas. Smith then fled to Mexico.
Seventeen days later, Major General Gordon Granger of the U.S. Army arrived on Galveston Island with about 2000 U.S. troops. On June 19, Granger issued General Order Number 3, informing the formerly enslaved inhabitants of Texas that they were free.
“The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free,” it read. “This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor.”
The order went on: “The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
General Order Number 3 informed formerly enslaved people that they were freed from enslavement and the suffocatingly circumscribed lives, restricted movement, corporal punishment, and stunted lives to which the American system of human slavery had previously confined them. It urged them to join the free labor economy the North championed, working for wages and seamlessly shifting their former relations with their former enslavers to ones of employee and employer.
The news arrived in a state consumed by chaos. During the war, white men had gone east to join the Confederate armies as planters had rushed west from Louisiana with their enslaved people to try to preserve the institution of slavery. Mexicans and Comanches had launched raids against the unsettled population, and the long-horned cattle, bottled up in Texas as the United States blockaded southern ports and the railroad lines degraded, had multiplied until observers estimated there were eight cattle for every one person in Texas, and the animals threatened those who ventured too close to them.
The fall of the Confederacy meant the collapse of whatever order remained in the state, and former Confederates were demoralized and angry. “It looked like everything worth living for was gone,” cattleman Charles Goodnight later recalled. Planters furious at the death of their cause and desperate to get crops in refused to tell the enslaved people in the fields of the dramatic change in their circumstances with the surrender of the last major Confederate army.
Against this backdrop, Granger’s men read General Order Number 3 to formerly enslaved Texans in Galveston. They heard the news and celebrated in the streets. The order was no magic bullet for the state—on far-flung plantations, some enslavers tried to hold enslaved people at work until after the harvest—but the news of freedom on June 19 provided a focus and a rallying point for Black Americans to celebrate freedom that stood out and apart from the chaos and anger around them.
A year later, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing enslavement except as punishment for a crime had been added to the U.S. Constitution, and on June 19, 1866, Texas freedpeople gathered to celebrate the coming of their freedom with prayers, speeches, food, and socializing.
By the following year, the federal government encouraged “Juneteenth” celebrations, eager to make sure Black citizens had an opportunity to discuss the voting rights that had been put in place by the Military Reconstruction Act in early March 1867, and the tradition of Juneteenth began to spread to Black communities across the nation.
Beginning there in Texas, the Black Americans celebrating Juneteenth emphasized that emancipation in the United States meant not just freedom from enslavement, but also freedom to shape the nation’s future.


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HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 20, 2022 (Monday)

Fifty-eight years ago today, on Saturday, June 20, 1964, twenty-year-old Andrew Goodman arrived in Meridian, Mississippi, to work with Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old former New York social worker, and James Chaney, a 21-year-old Black man, to register Black voters. “Dear Mom and Dad,” he wrote on a postcard home. “I have arrived safely in Meridian Mississippi. This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. The people in this city are wonderful and our reception was very good. All my love, Andy.”
What Goodman didn’t know was that members of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, dedicated to preserving segregation and to keeping Black people from voting, loathed Schwerner and at meetings routinely talked about killing him. They held off until they got authorization from the Klan’s state leader, Sam Bowers, but several weeks before Goodman arrived in Mississippi, they got that authorization.
The next day, Sunday, the three set out to investigate the recent burning of a church whose leaders had agreed to participate in voter registration, an arson that, unbeknownst to them, was committed by the same Klan members who had received authorization to kill Schwerner.
After the three men left the burned church, Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price stopped their car, allegedly for speeding, then arrested them on suspicion that they had burned the church. That night, after they paid their speeding ticket and left, Price followed them, stopped them, ordered them into his car, and then took them down a deserted road and turned them over to two carloads of his fellow terrorists. They beat and murdered the men and buried them at an earthen dam that was under construction.
It turned out that Price and Sheriff Lawrence A. Rainey were members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Price had alerted his fellow Klansmen that he had nabbed Schwerner, then dropped the three civil rights workers into their hands.
An FBI investigation to find the missing men ran up against both stonewalling and fear. Locals lied and obstructed the federal law enforcement officers, claiming that the three men had disappeared on their own hook to attract attention to the cause of voting rights. No state or local charges were brought against anyone suspected of being involved in the disappearances.
Finally, two of the Klansman cracked and began cooperating with the federal government.
In December 1964, 18 men were indicted for their participation in the murders. But the Ku Klux Klan members, who were accustomed to running their states as they saw fit, did not believe they would be punished. A notorious photograph caught Price and Rainey laughing at a hearing after their arraignment for conspiracy and violating the civil rights of the murdered men, both federal offenses.
Ultimately, Price was convicted and sentenced to six years in prison (he served four). Rainey, who was not at the murder scene, was found not guilty, but he lost his job and his marriage and blamed the FBI and the media for ruining his life.
Today, June 20, 2022, a Republican candidate for the Senate in Missouri, disgraced former governor Eric Greitens, released an advertisement threatening those Republicans he considers too moderate, the so-called Republicans In Name Only. Greitens resigned from his governorship after a woman accused him of tying her up, photographing her, sexually assaulting her, and then blackmailing her, and the Missouri legislature agreed that Greitens had engaged in “multiple acts constituting crimes, misconduct, and acts of moral turpitude.” When Greitens’s ex-wife accused him of abusing her and their children, Greitens claimed the accusations were egged on by “the RINO swamp.”
In the ad, Greitens is armed with a shotgun and flanked with military personnel as they burst into a house. “Today, we’re going RINO hunting,” he says. “The RINO feeds on corruption and is marked with the stripes of cowardice,” he continues. “Join the MAGA crew. Get a RINO hunting permit. There’s no bagging limit, no tagging limit, and it doesn’t expire until we save our country.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 21, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol held its fourth public hearing. The agenda was to lay out the scheme to pressure swing state electors to switch their states’ votes to Trump and then, when that failed, to get state operatives to create a false slate of electors to submit to Congress and the National Archives to set up an argument that there was confusion about who had won. That, Trump’s operatives hoped, would give then–vice president Mike Pence an excuse either to refuse to count Biden votes on the grounds that there was confusion over which slate was legitimate (there was no confusion: the Biden votes were certified and the Trump votes were not), or to send the certified electoral votes back to the state legislatures, where Republican-dominated bodies could recertify for Trump.
The scheme was illegal across the board.
It failed, committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) pointed out, because the system held. But that system has been under attack by Trump supporters for the past year and a half, and it is no longer clear that it will continue to hold. As proof, Thompson offered the case of the New Mexico panel that refused to certify the results of the recent election there. While two of the three panel members finally agreed to certify the results after pressure the state courts demanded they do so, one continued to refuse, citing “his gut feeling” that the results were wrong. That man was at the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
The theme of the day was our election systems, and how Trump’s attack on them continues to threaten our democracy.
The panel laid out how Trump and his people tried to get state legislators to throw out Biden votes and certify electoral votes for Trump, calling the lawmakers, inviting them to the White House, and, finally, threatening them over social media and sending protesters to their homes. When that didn’t work, they urged pro-Trump state politicians to produce alternative, false, slates of electors, promising that those slates would be used only if courts ruled the certified votes illegitimate. That promise, though, was a lie. Trump’s team planned to use the existence of two sets of electoral votes to justify throwing out both, thereby getting rid of legitimate Biden electors and giving the election to Trump.
The committee’s first panel included officials who had borne pressure from the Trump camp: Russell “Rusty” Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives; Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state; and Gabriel Sterling, the chief operating officer in the office of the Georgia secretary of state, responsible for overseeing elections.
All three are Republicans, at least two of whom supported Trump in the election but refused to do his illegal bidding after it. Once again, the committee told its story using only Republican testimony, making it hard for opponents to argue that the hearings are a political hit job. Schiff made a point of asking Bowers about his admiration for President Ronald Reagan, and Bowers talked about Reagan’s celebration of the orderly transfer of power in the United States, a tradition that Trump, of course, shattered.
The three men detailed pressure from Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, from lawyer John Eastman, from Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, and from Trump himself.
Bowers outlined weeks of pressure to produce a competing set of electors or to decertify the existing ones, even as Giuliani and Ellis refused to produce any evidence to back up their wild claims. Bowers refused to go along. Today, he testified passionately about the importance of his oath to the Constitution and his duty to the state of Arizona, and how Trump and his people were asking him to break an oath to a document he considers divinely inspired for the benefit of one man. Giuliani tried to convince him that, as Republicans, they should stick together to put their man back into the White House.
It wasn’t going to happen. Bowers wrote in his diary: “It is painful to have friends…turn on me with such rancor.” But “I do not want to be a winner by cheating. I will not play with laws I swore allegiance to.”
Raffensperger explained that the claims of fake “suitcases” of ballots in Georgia and other irregularities were false, that the election was “remarkably smooth,” and that two recounts produced the same results as the original counting of the votes. He talked of pressure from the Trump camp over its election lies. Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA), who was directing the proceedings today, noted that Meadows reached out 18 times to set up a phone call between Raffensperger and then-president Trump.
Once underway, the call took an extraordinary 67 minutes, as Trump repeatedly pushed Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, one more than Biden had won in the state. Trump told Raffensperger that it was “very dangerous” for him to say there was no fraud, a suggestion Raffensperger interpreted as a threat. “Why wouldn’t you want to find the right answer, Brad?” Trump demanded.
Sterling walked us through the “suitcases” allegation again, but his testimony focused on his anger at the disinformation coming from the Trump campaign and then-president Trump himself. He asked Trump directly, on camera, to stop inciting violence. “It’s not right,” he said. Rather than backing off, Trump escalated his pressure on Georgia, alleging “massive voter fraud” there.
The witnesses told the committee that Trump had tried to pressure them by whipping up his followers to harass them at home, terrifying them and their families. Bowers said he is still harassed every week, with people staking out his home and calling him a pedophile and a pervert. Raffensperger detailed the threats coming to him and his wife, and said that people broke into his widowed daughter-in-law’s home.
The threats provided the introduction to the next witness, who sat before the committee alone. After Thompson dismissed the first panel, the committee swore in Wandrea ArShaye “Shaye” Moss. Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, were the two Georgia election workers Trump and Giuliani targeted as rigging the vote. If Bowers represented the heights of political lawmaking, and Raffensperger and Sterling the bureaucracy of it, Moss and her mother, who was sitting behind her, represented the rest of us.
But Moss was not at all ordinary. She gave a passionate account of why she had chosen to become an election worker and how she had loved helping older people—people who had not been able to vote when they were young—submit their ballots. On the anniversary of the 1964 murder of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner for their efforts to register Black voters in Mississippi, Ms. Moss articulated just what the struggle for voting rights continues to mean.
Her testimony also outlined what that struggle continues to cost. Both she and her mother explained how they and Moss’s grandmother had been doxxed and harassed until they are now virtual prisoners in their homes—when they can be in them at all. The FBI warned Ms. Freeman to leave her home for two months around the time of January 6 because agents worried for her safety.
“Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?” Freeman said on video. “The President of the United States is supposed to represent every American. Not target one. But he targeted me: Lady Ruby, a small business owner, a mother, a proud American citizen, who stood up to help Fulton County run an election in the middle of the pandemic."
Taken together, today’s testimony showed the human side of the rule of law in the United States, and how Trump’s pressure on officials and weaponization of gangs to harass them threatens to destroy the system. Both Moss and Freeman have had to quit their jobs, along with all the permanent workers in the Georgia counting venue Trump and Giuliani attacked.
The committee revealed some other interesting information today. It said that protests at state houses, organized by Trump people, had some of the same characters who later showed up in Washington on January 6, including Jacob Chansley (the “QAnon Shaman” who showed up on January 6 in an animal headdress) and various Proud Boys.
It showed testimony from Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee, confirming that the RNC helped the Trump campaign collect the false electoral slates.
It named two lawmakers who appeared to participate in the attempt to overthrow the election. Representative Andy Biggs (R-AZ) apparently called Bowers to pressure him, and Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) wanted to hand the fake slates of electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to Pence on January 6.
Striding quickly past reporters today, Johnson told CNN’s chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju that he had “no idea” who asked him to share the fake electors with Pence. He said he had “no involvement” in the attempt to provide fake electors to overturn the legitimate outcome of the 2020 election and claimed he didn’t know who handed his office the envelope that was supposed to go to Pence. It was, he said, “some staff intern” who handed another staff member the envelope. When asked if he would try to find out, he said, “No. No, because there’s no conspiracy here. This is a complete non-story, guys. Complete non-story."

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 23, 2022 (Thursday)

Then-president Trump’s demand of Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen on December 27, 2020 was simple: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen." But the election wasn’t corrupt, and Rosen wouldn’t do as Trump asked.
Today’s fifth public hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was a barnburner. It explored Trump’s attempt to pervert the Department of Justice (DOJ), whose mission is “to enforce the law and defend the interests of the United States…and to ensure fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans,” to the service of Trump alone.
By now, the committee has firmly established that there was no evidence for Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen from him. Instead, recounts, court cases, and investigations all showed that Biden was the true victor by more than 7 million votes in the popular count, and by 306 to 232 votes in the Electoral College, the same count by which Trump won in 2016 and which he called a “massive landslide.” There was no evidence for his claims, and Trump knew that. His own appointees, including his attorney general William Barr, had told him repeatedly that the incidents he cited as proof were not, in fact, real. Barr called his arguments “bullsh*t.” But Trump continued to push them, quite possibly simply to lay the groundwork for keeping control of the government by force.
Led by Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), the committee members today questioned officials who served in the Trump administration at the end of his term: Jeffrey Rosen, who replaced Barr as acting attorney general in December 2020; Richard Donoghue, acting deputy attorney general and also a 20-year military veteran; and Steven Engel, assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel during Trump’s administration. Engel helpfully explained that the Office of Legal Counsel is essentially the lawyer for the attorney general and the president.
Rosen told the committee that Trump repeatedly pressured him and Donoghue to say that the 2020 election had been marred by fraud. But while they investigated his accusations, they found no evidence to support them. So Trump began to pressure them through public statements, telling television viewers as early as November 29, 2020, that the DOJ was “missing in action,” its leaders refusing to do their job. Members of Congress, who knew the allegations were false, echoed him. They included Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Jim Jordan (R-OH), and Mo Brooks (R-AL).
On December 21, a number of members of Congress met with Trump. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) was the only newly elected member; she would not be sworn in until January 3. The rest appeared to be members of the far-right so-called Freedom Caucus, formed in 2015 by Mark Meadows, then a congress member from North Carolina, and Mick Mulvaney, then a representative from South Carolina. (Both Meadows and Mulvaney would serve as Trump’s chief of staff during his presidency.) Jordan was the caucus’s first chair; Meadows was its second; Biggs was its third. Scott Perry (R-PA), who was there, is close to Jordan and Meadows.
Meadows, then White House chief of staff, tweeted that they had met to fight back against “voter fraud.” The next day, Perry went back to the White House with an environmental lawyer from the DOJ, Jeffrey Clark.
On December 24, Trump mentioned Clark to Rosen in passing. On December 26, Rosen asked Clark why Trump knew him. Clark admitted that he had met with the president when Perry took him—unexpectedly—to the White House. Clark was defensive, in part, perhaps, because there are strict guidelines to keep the DOJ and the White House separate to make sure there is neither impropriety nor the implication of impropriety when the DOJ investigates crimes. Clark promised Rosen it would not happen again.
And yet, Perry continued to text Meadows to urge him to put Clark at the head of the DOJ in place of Rosen. Trump told Perry to call Donoghue to push Clark’s elevation, saying Clark would get into the job and, unlike Rosen, “get in there and do some stuff.”
As Trump continued to press, he called Rosen and Donoghue at their homes late on December 27. Donoghue took notes. When Donoghue said the "DOJ can't and won't snap its fingers + change the outcome of the election," Trump replied it didn’t have to. "Just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen."
On December 28, Clark emailed to Rosen and Donoghue a letter alleging that the DOJ had “significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States.” It urged state legislatures to “consider objections” to the certified ballots and “decide between any competing slates of elector certificates.” The allegations in this letter were straight up false, but Trump wanted the Department of Justice to give them credence. Clearly, there was no time to actually conduct another investigation into the election before January 6; the letter was designed simply to justify counting out Biden’s ballots or, failing that, to create popular fury that might delay the January 6 count.
This attempt to use an investigation to corrupt politics echoed Trump’s attempt to get Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the actions of Hunter Biden in 2019 to seed the idea in the U.S. press that Biden was corrupt. It also recalled the 2016 drumbeat of an investigation into Secretary of State and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. Indeed, the Republicans have deliberately used “investigations” to convince the public of things that are not true since 1994 investigations of “voter fraud” that elected Democrats, and even back to Senator Joe McCarthy’s “investigations” of communists in the government in the 1950s. In each case, the goal was not actually to find the truth; it was to plant in the public mind the idea that there were crimes being committed…for why would anyone investigate if something wasn’t amiss?
Clark wrote the letter on official DOJ letterhead and left places for Rosen and Donoghue to sign it. Both of them rejected it out of hand, in strong language. Clark continued to push, and then to call witnesses and start his own investigation. Clark was working with Ken Klukowski, who arrived at the DOJ on December 15 and who was working with John Eastman, the lawyer pushing the idea of Pence counting out the Biden electors in states Trump wanted to win, suggesting that Trump had installed a conspirator directly in the DOJ to work with Eastman on the project.
On December 31, Trump asked both the DOJ and the Department of Homeland Security to seize voting machines that he insisted had shifted votes; Rosen said they had investigated and the machines were fine. At the end of that meeting, Trump warned that he thought he should just get rid of Rosen and Donoghue and put Clark in charge because then things would get done.
Rosen continued to debunk the election claims Trump and his allies were sending and tried to stop Clark from egging Trump on; Clark doubled down and demanded they sign the letter. On January 3, Clark told Rosen that Trump had offered him the job of attorney general, replacing Rosen, and that he would decline the job if Rosen signed the letter.
Rosen asked for a meeting with Trump, Engel, and White House counsel Pat Cipollone. At that point, only four people knew what Clark and Trump were up to, but Rosen now included the assistant attorneys general, all of whom said they would resign if Trump replaced Rosen with Clark. Both Rosen and Donoghue vowed to quit, too. But White House call logs—which the Trump administration tried to keep private—show that Trump and Clark had been in constant contact, violating official policy, and by 4:19 that afternoon, Trump was already referring to Clark as the attorney general.
“What have I got to lose?” Trump demanded. In a meeting of more than two and a half hours, Rosen, Donaghue, and all the other lawyers present except Clark warned Trump that there would be mass resignations from the DOJ if he went through with his plan, and that his decimation of the DOJ would overshadow all of his claims about the election. Cipollone called the idea a “murder-suicide pact.” Trump backed down then, but at the Ellipse three days later, he repeated all his debunked claims about the election.
Trump called neither Rosen nor Donoghue on January 6, although they spoke to all other top lawmakers, including Vice President Mike Pence.
After the attack on the Capitol, the congress members who had participated in the December 21 planning meeting asked for presidential pardons. Those members included Biggs, Greene, Brooks, Gaetz, Gohmert, and Perry. (Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking a minor; presumably a blanket pardon would have covered that issue, too.) Biggs, Gaetz, and Gohmert sit on the House Judiciary Committee, which oversees the DOJ.
Jordan asked more generally about pardons for members of Congress who had worked with Trump to overturn the election. Trump awarded Jordan the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on January 11, 2021. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) initially named Jordan, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, to serve on the January 6th committee and withdrew the other Republicans when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) rejected Jordan and Jim Banks (R-IN).
And Brooks wrote to Trump’s executive assistant Molly Michael, saying “President Trump asked me to send you this letter…. I recommend that President give general (all purpose) pardons to…[e]very Congressman and Senator who voted to reject the electoral college vote submissions of Arizona and Pennsylvania.”
When interviewed about the letter, Clark repeatedly took the Fifth Amendment against self-incrimination and invoked executive privilege. Yesterday, federal investigators executed a search warrant on Clark’s home in suburban Virginia. They seized his electronic devices.
At the end of today’s hearing, Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY), the January 6 committee’s vice chair, directly addressed Trump supporters: “It can be difficult to accept that President Trump abused your trust, that he deceived you. Many will invent excuses to ignore that fact. But that is a fact. I wish it weren’t true, but it is.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 24, 2022 (Friday)

At yesterday’s hearing of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, we heard overwhelming proof that former president Trump and his congressional supporters tried to overturn the will of the voters in the 2020 presidential election and steal control of our country to keep a minority in power.
Today, thanks to three justices nominated by Trump, the Supreme Court stripped a constitutional right from the American people, a right we have enjoyed for almost 50 years, a right that is considered a fundamental human right in most liberal democracies, and a right they indicated they would protect because it was settled law. Today’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that recognized a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. For the first time in our history, rather than conveying rights, the court has explicitly taken a constitutional right away from the American people.
These two extraordinary events are related. The current-day Republican Party has abandoned the idea of a democracy in which a majority of the people elect their government. Instead, its members have embraced minority rule.
The Dobbs decision marks the end of an era: the period in American history stretching from 1933 to 1981, the era in which the U.S. government worked to promote democracy. It tried to level the economic playing field between the rich and the poor by regulating business and working conditions. It provided a basic social safety net through programs like Social Security and Medicare and, later, through food and housing security programs. It promoted infrastructure like electricity and highways, and clean air and water, to try to maintain a basic standard of living for Americans. And it protected civil rights by using the Fourteenth Amendment, added to the U.S. Constitution in 1868, to stop states from denying their citizens the equal protection of the laws.
Now the Republicans are engaged in the process of dismantling that government. For forty years, the current Republican Party has worked to slash business regulations and the taxes that support social welfare programs, to privatize infrastructure projects, and to end the federal protection of civil rights by arguing for judicial “originalism” that claims to honor the original version of the Constitution rather than permitting the courts to protect rights through the Fourteenth Amendment.
But most Americans actually like the government to hold the economic and social playing field level. So, to win elections, Republicans since 1986 have suppressed votes, flooded the media with propaganda attacking those who like government action as dangerous socialists, gerrymandered congressional districts, abused the Senate filibuster to stop all Democratic legislation, and finally, when repeated losses in the popular vote made it clear their extremist ideology would never again command a majority, stacked the Supreme Court.
The focus of the originalists on the court has been to slash the federal government and make the states, once again, the centerpiece of our democratic system. That democracy belonged to the states was the argument of the southern Democrats before the Civil War, who insisted that the federal government could not legitimately intervene in state affairs. At the same time, though, state lawmakers limited the vote in their state, so “democracy” did not reflect the will of the majority. It reflected the interests of those few who could vote.
State governments, then, tended to protect the power of a few wealthy, white men, and to write laws reinforcing that power. Southern lawmakers defended human enslavement, for example, a system that concentrated wealth among a few white men. Challenged to defend their enslavement of their neighbors in a country that boasted “all men are created equal,” they argued that enslavement was secondary to the fact that voters had chosen to impose it.
The originalists on today’s Supreme Court have repeatedly emphasized that the states, rather than the federal government, should determine the laws under which we live. So, for example, in the Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez case decided on May 23, the court overturned a previous decision to say that two men on Arizona’s death row who had received ineffective legal assistance at their trials could not introduce new evidence at the federal level that would exonerate them. The decision said that such a review would “intrude on state sovereignty.”
And today, by a vote of 6 to 3, the court overturned Roe v. Wade, arguing that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level, even as states are restricting the right to vote. Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, claimed that the Constitution does not protect the right to abortion because it does not mention that right. While the court says it is willing to protect some rights not mentioned, they must be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” In a concurring decision, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested the court should also revisit the right to use birth control and to engage in gay relationships or marriage.
We are still waiting on another potentially explosive decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, in which the court will decide if Congress can delegate authority to government agencies as it has done since the 1930s. If the court says Congress can’t delegate authority, even if it waters that argument down, government regulation could become virtually impossible. Having taken the federal government’s power to protect civil rights, it would then have taken its power to regulate business.
And yet, just yesterday, the court struck down a New York state law restricting the concealed carrying of guns on the grounds that history suggested such a restriction was unconstitutional. In fact, in both the Dobbs decision and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court used stunningly bad history, clearly just working to get to the modern-day position it wanted. Abortion was, in fact, deeply rooted in this nations history not only in the far past but also in the past 49 years, and individual gun rights were not part of our early history.
The court is imposing on the nation a so-called originalism that will return power to the states, leaving the door open for state lawmakers to get rid of business regulation and gut civil rights, but its originalism also leaves the door open for the federal government to impose laws on the states that are popular with Republicans. Already, the same day that the court handed down a decision striking down Roe v. Wade on the grounds that laws about abortion should come from the states, Republican politicians are calling for a federal law banning abortion everywhere.
In its imposition of minority rule first by insisting on state’s rights and then by demanding federal protection of laws it wants, the Republican Party is echoing the southern Democrats before the Civil War. Like today’s Republicans, as they lost support they entrenched themselves first in the machinery of the federal government and then in the Supreme Court.
And, finally, when northerners realized that enslavers had gamed the system to spread slavery across the nation, they came together from all different parties to protest and to stand against that attempt to destroy democracy and hand the country over to a few rich men. Ironically, that was the birth of the Republican Party that, under Abraham Lincoln, worked to create a government “of the people, by the people, [and] for the people.”
Tonight, there are protests around the country.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 25, 2022 (Saturday)

Today marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, when Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer, who led the 7th Cavalry, lost his entire command to Lakota warriors after falling on them unexpectedly in their own territory. The only army survivor of the battle from Custer's immediate command was a horse, Comanche, who became the 7th Cavalry’s mascot, trotted out draped in ceremonial black for years after the event itself.
The road to the Little Bighorn started during the Civil War. In 1862, Santee warriors in Minnesota rose up against settlers there after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, stopped providing the food promised to the Santee by treaty. Soldiers put down the “Santee Uprising”—now known as the Dakota War—brutally, and terrified survivors fled west to what is now Montana to take shelter with their relatives, the Teton Lakotas.
The Lakotas welcomed their eastern relatives but discounted their horrific tales of the revenge enacted on the Santee insurgents (although the army had, in fact, hanged 38 Santee in December 1862 in the largest mass execution in American history). The Lakotas rarely saw an American, and they could not believe the lone traders who passed through their territory were a threat.
Lakota nonchalance ended abruptly in November 1864, when Northern Cheyennes, their allies to the south, straggled into Lakota villages with even worse stories than the Santees had told: stories of the massacre of women and children at Colorado’s Sand Creek, where drunken soldiers first killed surrendering Cheyennes and then mutilated their bodies, taking human remains as trophies. By 1864, American miners were pushing into Lakota territory over the new Bozeman Trail that stretched from the old Oregon Trail up to the Montana gold fields. Stories of the Sand Creek Massacre convinced the Lakotas that the interlopers must be resisted.
By 1865, the conflicts, now known as the Lakota War, had escalated to the point that after Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House, army leaders transferred General William Tecumseh Sherman from the southern battlefields to the Plains. To his intense frustration, he found it impossible to protect both the Union Pacific Railroad, which stretched across the middle of the country, and the Bozeman Trail, which went north, from Lakota attacks.
Caught between these two demands, the government chose to protect the railroad. In 1868, it abandoned the Bozeman Trail, giving the Lakotas control of what became known as the Great Sioux Reservation. This reservation covered most of the land from the Missouri River that runs through the center of what is now South Dakota west to the Big Horn Mountains. The treaty each side signed guaranteed that land to the Lakotas forever.
Forever turned out to be short.
Rising Lakota leaders Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse vowed to keep Americans off their land, but miners wanted gold and businessmen wanted railroads. By 1874, army officers decided to build a fort in the Black Hills to intimidate the warriors skirmishing with intruders. In 1875, they sent out the Boy General, George Armstrong Custer, along with a thousand soldiers, teamsters, scouts, and reporters, to find a place to build. Custer brought back ideas for a fort, but, more importantly, he also brought back news of gold in “them thar hills”—hills that belonged to the Lakotas.
Within months, prospectors in the Black Hills had thrown up boomtowns like Deadwood, which attracted about twenty thousand people in its first year. The government tried to buy the Black Hills, but Lakota leaders refused. “We want no white men here,” Sitting Bull said. “The Black Hills belong to me. If the whites try to take them, I will fight.”
Government officials interpreted Lakota refusal to sell as hostility. In December 1875, authorities told Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and other “hostiles” to report to agencies more than 250 miles away on the eastern side of the reservation by the end of January, or to expect war. For their part, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, who had never frequented the agencies, made no attempt to set off on a long journey in the brutal cold of a Dakota winter. It’s not clear they even got the message.
So on February 1, 1876, the War Department commanded the army to subdue the “hostile” Lakotas. A month later, General George Crook led 800 men into Lakota territory, hoping to fight the Indigenous Americans while their ponies were still weak from the winter. In mid-March, half of Crook’s men attacked a camp of Cheyennes on the Powder River, mistaking it for a village of Crazy Horse’s men. Cheyenne survivors took refuge with Sitting Bull, who had had enough. “We are an island of Indians in a lake of whites,” he told his people. “We must stand together, or they will rub us out separately. These soldiers have come shooting; they want war. All right, we’ll give it to them.”
Sitting Bull sent runners across the reservation, calling men who wanted to fight to meet at the Rosebud River to stand against the soldiers. By spring 1876, thousands of men had rallied to him. In early summer 1876, Sitting Bull’s camp was the largest in Lakota history; there were at least 1400 lodges, with individual men sleeping on their own or as guests in others’ tepees.
Badly underestimating the number of warriors he faced, Crook planned a three-pronged attack. Columns from west, east, and south would converge where the Lakota were hunting. Crook’s plan was crippled on June 17, when his own column, moving up from the south, crossed Lakota warriors near the Rosebud River. In a confusing battle obscured by dust and gunpowder, the Lakota managed to knock Crook’s men out of the campaign for the next six weeks.
Those weeks would prove crucial. As the other two columns continued their march, Indigenous Americans celebrating the outcome of the Battle of the Rosebud continued to pour into Sitting Bull’s camp, bringing the numbers up to about 7000 people, 1800 of whom were warriors. In the vibrant atmosphere, families visited, couples courted, and warriors danced. The numbers meant that the Lakotas and their allies had to keep moving to provide enough food for the horses. By June 24, they had settled on the river they called the Greasy Grass, the one soldiers knew as the Little Bighorn.
Unaware of the two columns approaching, the Lakotas were watching Crook’s soldiers but knew his battered troops were hunkered down. On June 25, a hot, buggy day, the Lakotas were lazing, the women digging wild turnips and the men swimming and lying about in the heat, when Custer’s troops fell on one end of their mile-long encampment. The soldiers cut down some women and children, but the Lakotas mounted their horses quickly.
Custer had divided his men into three battalions. He had sent one under Captain Frederick Benteen up the valley and out of action, and sent one under Major Marcus Reno to attack the camp. Recovering from their initial surprise, the Lakotas chased Reno and his men into the bluffs on the other side of the river. Then Custer’s battalion entered the fight. Custer ordered his men to dismount. The Lakotas promptly stampeded the army horses. Then, surrounding the desperate troops, the Lakotas killed the soldiers to a man. The U.S. Army lost 263 men that day, the Lakotas about 40.
“I feel sorry that too many were killed on each side,” Sitting Bull said, “but when Indians must fight, they must.”

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 26, 2022 (Sunday)

Defenders of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade insist that Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health does not outlaw abortion but simply returns the decision about reproductive rights to the states.
“It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. He quoted the late Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote: “The permissibility of abortion, and the limitations, upon it, are to be resolved like most important questions in our democracy: by citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting.” This, Alito wrote, “is what the Constitution and the rule of law demand.”
The idea that state voters are the centerpiece of American democracy has its roots in the 1820s, when southern leaders convinced poorer Americans that the nation was drifting toward an aristocracy that ignored the needs of ordinary people. The election of 1824, when established politicians overrode the popular vote to put John Quincy Adams into the presidency, seemed to illustrate that drift. Supporters of Adams’s chief rival, Andrew Jackson, complained that a wealthy elite was taking over the country and, once in charge, would use the power of the federal government to cement their control over the country’s capital, crushing ordinary Americans.
The rough, uneducated Andrew Jackson, who promised to break the hold of northeastern elites on the government and return democracy to the people, began to articulate a new vision of American government. He insisted that democratic government should actually look like a democracy: it should be formed by the votes of local people, not those from some far-off capital, and it should be made up of those same ordinary voters, not eastern elites like Adams, whose wealthy president father, John, had reared his son to follow in his footsteps.
Jackson’s new vision made ordinary Americans central to the democratic system. Democratic government put the power into the hands of individual voters. Local and state government was the most important stage of this system; the federal government always ran the risk of being taken over by an elite cabal that could override the will of the people. It must always be kept as small as possible.
But there was a power play in this argument. By the time Jackson was elected president in 1828, white southerners already knew they were badly outnumbered in the nation as a whole. In that year, quite dramatically, a congressional fight over tariffs ended up with a strong bill that hurt the South in favor of northern manufacturing. Outraged, southern leaders with Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina at their head claimed the right to “nullify” federal laws. (Jackson later said that one of the two regrets he had at the end of his term was that he “was unable to…hang John C. Calhoun.")
Congress lowered the tariff and the southerners backed down, but the idea that states were superior to the federal government only gained strength among southern enslavers as they felt the heat of a growing movement to abolish slavery. When it became clear that the U.S. might well acquire territory in Latin America, Democrats sympathetic to the South pushed back against the national majority that wanted to stop the spread of slavery into those lands by insisting on the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”: permitting the people who lived in a territory to decide for themselves whether or not to permit enslavement in it (although Mexico had outlawed enslavement in 1829). The U.S. acquired the vast territory of the American West in 1848, and two years later, Congress turned to popular sovereignty to try to avoid a fight about enslavement there.
The issue turned volatile in 1854 when Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas pushed through Congress a law overturning the 1820 Missouri Compromise and organizing two super-states out of the remaining land of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Rather than being free as the Missouri Compromise had promised, those huge states of Kansas and Nebraska would have enslavement or not based on the votes of those who lived there. This, Douglas insisted in his debates with Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln in 1858, was the true meaning of democracy:
“I deny the right of Congress to force a slaveholding State upon an unwilling people,” he said, “I deny their right to force a free State upon an unwilling people…. The great principle is the right of every community to judge and decide for itself, whether a thing is right or wrong, whether it would be good or evil for them to adopt it…. It is no answer to this argument to say that slavery is an evil, and hence should not be tolerated. You must allow the people to decide for themselves whether it is a good or an evil….” “Uniformity in local and domestic affairs,” he said, “would be destructive of State rights, of State sovereignty, of personal liberty and personal freedom.”
A strong majority in the U.S. opposed the extension of enslavement, but Douglas’s reasoning overrode that majority by carving the voting population into small groups the Democrats could dominate by whipping up voters with viciously racist speeches. Then, in the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a stacked Supreme Court blessed this plan by announcing that Congress had no power to legislate in the territories. In our system, this would mean that states taken over by pro-slavery zealots would eventually win enough power at the federal level to make enslavement national.
“A house divided against itself cannot stand," Lincoln warned Americans. “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved—I do not expect the house to fall—but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new—North as well as South.”
After the Civil War had proved the power of the federal government to defend the will of the majority from the tyranny of the minority, Congress found itself once again forced to override the will of state governments. When state legislatures put in place the Black Codes, which created a second-class status in the South for Black Americans, Congress passed and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, overriding the Dred Scott decision to make Black Americans citizens, and establishing that “[n]o state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Almost 80 years later, it was this amendment—the Fourteenth—to which the Supreme Court turned to protect the rights of Black and Brown Americans, women, LGBTQ, and so on, from state laws that threatened their health and safety or treated them as second-class citizens. In using the power of the federal government to guarantee “the equal protection of the laws,” it made sure that a small pool of voters couldn’t strip rights from their neighbors. It is this effort today’s Supreme Court is gutting.
When today’s jurists talk of sending decisions about civil rights back to the states, they are echoing Stephen Douglas. “Citizens trying to persuade one another and then voting” is indeed precisely how democracy is supposed to work. But choosing your voters to make sure the results will be what you want is a different kettle of fish altogether.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 27, 2022 (Monday)

Midday today, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol announced a hearing “to present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” This is a surprise, and it was not until late tonight that reporters confirmed with their sources that the witness will be Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former president Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows. Hutchinson was the person who revealed that congress members had asked for pardons.
Legal analyst Asha Rangappa tweeted that she will be watching to see if Hutchinson can testify that Trump, Meadows, or members of Congress either knew about or planned violence for January 6 to pressure Pence. “If so, it brings them into crosshairs of seditious conspiracy,” she wrote.
While we have been focused on the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade more news has come out about the attempt of Trump and his allies to overturn the government.
Indeed, scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat today noted that there is a relationship between the insurrection and the radical Supreme Court decisions coming out. Justice Clarence Thomas has been writing opinions and footnotes that are to the right even of the rest of the radical court, and today he suggested he would like the court to revisit the 1964 New York Times v. Sullivan decision that provides some protection to media outlets from being sued for defamation by requiring a plaintiff to prove the outlet acted with “actual malice.” Thomas wants to make it easier to sue media outlets because, he wrote, the “New York Times and its progeny have allowed media organizations and interest groups ‘to cast false aspersions on public figures with near impunity.’”
Ben-Ghiat tweeted that “[s]elf-protection (and protection for corrupt family members) is a huge driver of authoritarian behaviors. He feels threatened and will try and change the legal order to avoid scrutiny. Radicalized people no longer care about ‘how it looks’ to outsiders.”
In this particular case, Thomas’s beef is with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for calling out Coral Ridge Ministries Media, Inc., as a “hate group” because of its opposition to homosexuality and gay rights. The SPLC identifies as hate groups any groups that "have beliefs or practices that malign or attack an entire class of people, typically for their immutable characteristics." “SPLC’s ‘hate group’ designation lumped Coral Ridge’s Christian ministry with groups like the Ku Klux Klan and Neo-Nazis,” Thomas complained, and that hurt their ability to raise money.
Recent stories about the attempt to overturn the election include, most notably, Politico’s report of last Monday that British filmmaker Alex Holder filmed the Trump family from September 2020 through to mid-January 2021 to record for posterity their actions during the historic election. Apparently, this was a family project, and a number of the people on the campaign did not know.
Last Thursday, the January 6 committee interviewed Holder. It has also subpoenaed the tape and the raw footage.
There are continuing signs that the attempt to overturn the Democratic victory in 2020 and install Trump in office swept in more lawmakers than the committee identified last Thursday. When news broke last Tuesday that Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson, a Republican, had tried to hand off slates of false electors from Michigan and Wisconsin to then–Vice President Mike Pence at the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, Johnson initially passed it off as the work of an unnamed intern and called it a “non-story.”
Two days later, Johnson changed his tune, saying that the office of Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) had sent the fake slates of electors and that Johnson, his chief of staff, and Trump-affiliated lawyer Jim Troupis had coordinated through text messages to figure out how to get the fake ballots to Pence. Kelly’s office promptly said Kelly "has not spoken to Sen. Johnson for the better part of a decade, and he has no knowledge of the claims Mr. Johnson is making related to the 2020 election."
Meanwhile in Colorado, Tina Peters, an election official from Mesa County who has been charged with crimes for her role in trying to overturn the results of the election, on Friday told Nick Corasaniti and Alexandra Berzon of the New York Times that Lauren Boebert (R-CO) encouraged her “to go forward” with stealing and sharing voter information. That information, allegedly obtained through identity theft and illegal breach of computers, later turned up on a right-wing website and at a symposium organized by Mike Lindell, the owner of the MyPillow Company and a leading Trump supporter, alleging voter fraud. A press secretary for Boebert calls the claims false.
Today we also learned that the Department of Justice last week seized the phones of John Eastman, the man who wrote the infamous memo outlining plans for Pence to steal the election. In a lawsuit trying to get the phones released and all that was on them deleted, Eastman’s lawyers explained that federal prosecutors had stopped Eastman outside a restaurant in New Mexico on June 22. This was the same day federal agents executed a search warrant on Jeffrey Clark. Trump wanted to make Clark acting attorney general in the days before January 6 so he would work to overturn the election.
Right-wing insistence Friday night that the weekend would be characterized by “rage” as pro-choice supporters turned violent seemed designed to draw false equivalence between those who stormed the Capitol to overturn the election and those angry at the Supreme Court’s refusal to recognize a constitutional right that the American people have enjoyed for half a century—and, perhaps, to justify brutality to silence those protests. In fact, aside from sporadic violence against the protesters rather than from them, the protests were peaceful.
There is another link between the recent Supreme Court decisions and the January 6 attempt to destroy our democracy that creates an unprecedented situation. If Trump is prosecuted as the leader of an attempted coup, a coup that may have included some of those who voted for Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees, what does that do to their positions on the court?

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

June 28, 2022 (Tuesday)

Today’s testimony before the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol was explosive. It tied former president Donald Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows directly to a plot to overturn the U.S. government.
The witness was Cassidy Hutchinson, a 25-year-old aide to Meadows and congressional liaison who was well known on Capitol Hill. She was a staunch Republican who had worked for Representative Steve Scalise (R-LA), the second highest Republican in the House, and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX). An aide to former House speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), Brendan Buck, tweeted that “when Meadows was on the Hill he always insisted that she be in *every* meeting he had, no matter how small. It was odd then, and doesn't seem to be working out for him now.”
Hutchinson testified that leaders in the Trump White House planned the attack on the Capitol. On January 2, 2021, Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani met with Meadows and others in the White House, and as Hutchinson walked him to his vehicle, Giuliani asked her if she was excited about the sixth, saying, “We’re going to the Capitol! It’s going to be great!” When she asked Meadows what Giuliani meant, Meadows told her, “There’s a lot going on…things might get real, real bad on January 6.”
On January 4, National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien called Meadows to warn of violence on January 6. The Secret Service and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Anthony Ornato, who was in charge of security protocol to protect anyone covered by presidential protection, also warned of coming violence.
Hutchinson connected Trump to the insurrection attempt when she noted that on January 5, Trump told Meadows to contact Trump confidants Roger Stone and Michael Flynn, both of whom Trump had recently pardoned after they had been convicted of crimes, to talk about the next day. Hutchinson says Meadows did that. At the time, Stone was in Washington, D.C., where he was repeatedly photographed with members of the Oath Keepers who were acting as his bodyguards. A number of Oath Keepers have been charged with seditious conspiracy; at least two have pleaded guilty.
That night, Meadows wanted to go to the “War Room” that Giuliani, Trump lawyer John Eastman, and others had set up at the Willard Hotel, but he ultimately decided to call in rather than to go in person.
According to Hutchinson, by about 8:00 on the morning of January 6, intelligence reports were already coming in that some of the people near the Ellipse, where Trump was to speak, were dressed in body armor and armed with Glock-style pistols, shotguns, and AR-15s, along with other weapons. At 10:00, Hutchinson, Ornato, and Meadows talked of the weapons, but Meadows brushed it off, asking only if they had told Trump, which they had.
That made Hutchinson’s next revelation seismic. Text messages between Hutchinson and Ornato show that Trump was “furious” before the Ellipse rally because he wanted photos to show the space full of people and it was not full because law enforcement was screening people for weapons before they could go in. Trump wanted the screening machines, called magnetometers, to be taken down. Hutchinson testified that Trump yelled, "They're not here to hurt me. Take the F'ing mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here."
Then, knowing that some of the people in the crowd were armed, Trump repeatedly urged them to “fight,” using language his lawyers had warned against.
Hutchinson testified that Trump was determined to go to the Capitol with the crowd despite the desperate efforts of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to make sure it didn’t happen. Cipollone told Hutchinson that Trump’s appearance there would open the White House up to being charged with “every crime imaginable” because it would look like Trump was inciting a riot. Nonetheless, Trump was furious that Meadows had not been able to persuade the Secret Service to make it happen, so furious that Cassidy heard from others that when he found that the SUV in which he was riding would not take him to the Capitol, Trump had lunged at the agent refusing to take him there.
Hutchinson did not know what the plan was for Trump’s trip to the Capitol, but there was talk of an additional speech there, “before he went in. I know that there was a conversation about him going into the House chamber at one point,” she said. The president is only supposed to go into the House chamber when specifically invited, so perhaps he expected to be invited in, or perhaps he was going in without an invitation, or perhaps those talking about it were just tossing out unworkable ideas.
Back at the White House, as the rioters breached the Capitol, Hutchinson went into Meadows’s office between 2:00 and 2:05 to ask if he was watching the scene unfold on his television. Scrolling through his phone, he answered that he was. She asked if he had talked to Trump. He said, “Yeah. He wants to be alone right now.” Cipollone burst into the office and said to go get the president. Meadows repeated that Trump didn't want to do anything. Cipollone "very clearly said this to Mark—something to the effect of, 'Mark, something needs to be done or people are going to die and the blood's going to be on your f-ing hands. This is getting out of control.'”
When the rioters began to chant, “Hang Mike Pence,” Cipollone tried again to get Trump to stop the rioters, and Meadows again said, “You heard it, Pat. He thinks Pence deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.” Then, rather than calming the crowd as it threatened the vice president, at 2:24, Trump put out the tweet further blaming Pence for letting him down.
By 3:00, White House personnel, Ivanka Trump, and various members of Congress were begging Trump to release a statement telling the rioters to go home, making it clear they all knew he could make the violence stop if only he wanted to. But he didn’t want to. Not until 4:17, after Biden had already made a statement, did he speak up. Trump told the rioters to go home and that “we love you.”
The next day, as Cabinet officers talked of invoking the 25th Amendment to the Constitution and removing Trump from office, advisors convinced Trump to make a video. Even then, he refused to say that the rioters should be prosecuted—instead, he wanted to talk of pardoning them—and refused to say that the election was over.
In the aftermath of the insurrection, both Meadows and Giuliani asked for a presidential pardon.
What emerged from today’s explosive hearing was the story of a president and his close advisors who planned a coup, sent an armed mob to the Capitol, approved of calls to murder the vice president, and had to be forced to call the mob off. Two of the president’s closest advisors then asked for a presidential pardon. While they did not get those pardons, Trump’s PAC later gave $1 million to Meadows’s Conservative Partnership Institute.
That, right there, is enough to make today stunning. But there was more.
Hutchinson described an angry and violent man who threw plates at the walls when he was frustrated.
The committee revealed that when it interviewed Michael Flynn, he took the Fifth on whether violence on January 6th was justified either legally or morally. He also took the Fifth on whether he believed in the peaceful transition of power in the U.S.
Vice-chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) revealed at the end of the hearing that witnesses said they had been pressured by Trump’s people to remain “loyal” when testifying, and having just tipped their hand about just how much information the committee has, Thompson urged those witnesses to come back and revise their testimony. He urged others to come forward as well—perhaps a nudge to Cipollone, who has been portrayed positively in the hearings, both today and in the hearing covering Trump’s attempt to install Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general, when Cipollone stood against that corruption.
CNN journalist Jake Tapper concluded: “It was devastating testimony, a portrait of a president who was completely and utterly out of control and, without question, knew of the danger of his supporters that were going to the mall…. This was obscene.”
It was. And yet no one in the White House either spoke up to warn us before January 6 or testified at Trump’s second impeachment trial, where he was charged with incitement of insurrection and, thanks to Republican senators, acquitted.