Our book, Divided We Stand, looks at the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection. Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.
President Donald J. Trump attempted to make the Jan. 6, 2021, march on the Capitol appear spontaneous even as he and his team intentionally assembled and galvanized a violence-prone mob to disrupt certification of his electoral defeat, the House committee investigating the attack showed on Tuesday.
“POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol,” Kylie Jane Kremer, an organizer of the “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, wrote in a Jan. 4 text shown by the panel on Tuesday as it detailed Mr. Trump’s efforts to gather his backers in Washington for a final, last-ditch effort to overturn his loss. Ms. Kremer added that Mr. Trump was “going to just call for it ‘unexpectedly.’”
Mr. Trump weighed announcing the move, according to documents obtained from the National Archives, which provided the investigators with a draft tweet that said: “I will be making a Big Speech at 10AM on January 6th at the Ellipse (South of the White House). Please arrive early, massive crowds expected. March to the Capitol after. Stop the Steal!!”
The tweet was never sent. But it was the latest evidence presented by the committee of how Mr. Trump undertook a public and private effort to channel angry supporters, including right-wing extremists, toward the Capitol, where Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers were gathered to confirm Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect.
Lloyd Green at The Guardian:
By the time the closing gavel fell on Tuesday’s hearing, the American public had received another hours-long refresher on the 45th president’s disdain for the will of the electorate, and his appetite for chaos and self-aggrandizement.
On Friday night, 18 December 2020, he allowed the lunatics into the asylum. Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and Patrick Byrne, the former lover of Maria Butina, the Russian spy, were all there in one place – that place being the Oval Office.
Some context: in mid-December, Flynn was a rock star. Just a week earlier, he had received a presidential pardon. Byrne is the former CEO of Overstock and a huge fan of cryptocurrency. He also doubted Rudy Giuliani’s legal chops.
“I had watched two months slide by Mayor Giuliani and his team displaying no organization or progress,” Byrne blogged. “Watching them trying to get anything done was like watching half-a-dozen monkeys trying to fuck a football.”
Fortunately, Pat Cipollone, the White House counsel, and Eric Herschmann, another Trump lawyer, pushed back against the motley crew. They made clear there was no basis to claim that fraud affected the election’s outcome.
Likewise, the duo said “no” to appointing Powell as a special election counsel and opposed the federal government seizing voting machines located in electoral battlegrounds. Some things really were beyond the pale.
