This week, the long-awaited return of the January 6th committee’s public hearings made it more clear than ever that the former president and those who side with him are a massive danger to our democracy and our most fundamental rights. The new revelations from the committee have led to the direct subpoena of the former president to testify in front of the committee. Even with these revelations, the MAGA Republican movement continues to attempt to undermine elections, avoid accountability, and threaten our right to vote, while midterm elections are just around the corner.
Here’s what you need to know for the weekend:
Main Points for the Weekend:
1. After a summary of all of the evidence presented by the Select Committee thus far, the Committee voted unanimously to subpoena Trump to testify under oath. Vice Chair Cheney also said that criminal referrals for multiple individuals are likely to follow in the future.
-
- Top point to make: It has been long enough, Donald Trump must speak on his actions to overturn the will of the voters. He must be held accountable.
-
- If you read one thing: Axios, 10/13/22: Jan. 6 committee unanimously votes to subpoena Trump. “Why it matters: The 9-0 vote came during Thursday’s televised meeting aimed at making the case that Trump was the central antagonist in the attack and in preceding efforts to overturn the election… What they’re saying: ‘He is the one person at the center of the story of what happened on January 6. So we want to hear from him,’ said Chair Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.)… On July 19, Thompson said: ‘Donald Trump is just like every other American citizen in this situation. And if [he has some information] that the public can benefit from him as a witness … Then we’ll make every attempt to bring him in.’’
2. The Select Committee has painted a clear picture: Trump and his advisors knew that he lost the 2020 election. New evidence from the Committee shows Trump decided to declare victory in the election no matter what.
-
- Top point to make: Donald Trump and his allies engaged in a premeditated, coordinated, violent, illegal, and unconstitutional conspiracy to change the results of an election he knew he lost.
-
- If you read one thing: Wall Street Journal, 10/13/22: Trump Knew He Lost the Election, Aides Testify. “Despite his claims, former President Donald Trump privately conceded he lost to Joe Biden, according to video testimony from former administration officials. He also took dramatic steps to potentially withdraw troops from Afghanistan, steps that the committee showed he knew he had lost and wanted to make the move before incoming President Joe Biden took office. ‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?’ former Trump communications strategist Alyssa Farah Griffin said she heard Mr. Trump say… Other administration officials were shown testifying that the election was over, and Mr. Trump had lost… ‘President Trump knew the truth,’ Mr. Kinzinger said, but made the decision to pursue an unlawful effort to stay in power.”
3. The Secret Service was aware of weapons in the crowd and violent threats days before January 6th. According to the committee, the Secret Service was tipped off that the rioters on January 6th planned to “literally kill people”.
-
- Top point to make: MAGA Republicans will stop at nothing, including violence, threatening law enforcement, and other reckless behavior in order to follow the former president.
-
- If you read one thing: Rolling Stone, 10/13/22: Secret Service Had Tip That Proud Boys Planned to ‘Literally Kill People’ on Jan. 6. “The Jan. 6 committee during its hearing on Thursday displayed a tip relayed to the Secret Service by the FBI from a source warning that the Proud Boys planned to ‘literally kill people’ on Jan. 6. ‘their plan is to literally kill people,’ the tip read. ‘Please please take this tip seriously and investigate further.’… The threats of armed protesters flocking to the Capitol discussed by the committee were connected to Trump’s alleged behavior at his Jan. 6 rally that preceded the riot. Former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified in June President Trump demanded that security measures and metal detectors be taken down, insisting that the armed attendees outside the designated rally space were ‘not here to hurt me.’”
4. Local election workers and systems across the country continue to face attacks heading into the midterm elections. While already short-staffed because of physical threats and harassment, elections workers in many states are reporting an increase in cyberattacks and phishing.
-
- Top point to make: The threat to our country is ongoing. And MAGA Republicans have a new game plan for 2022, 2024, and beyond.
-
- If you read one thing: Time, 10/12/22: Election Workers in Battleground States Face Surge of Cyberattacks. “While much of the security discussed about the midterms has focused on disinformation and countering foreign cyberattacks, county election workers in the key battleground states of Arizona and Pennsylvania dealt with a surge of phishing attacks coinciding with their primary elections, data shared with TIME by cybersecurity firm Trellix shows. These attacks have included familiar phishing schemes to access passwords as well as newer ones targeting the absentee-ballot process, according to the report. “They’re preying on the prototypical easy way in,” says Patrick Flynn, who heads the Advanced Programs Group at Trellix. The goal, he says, is to get local election workers to give away access to their own personal data as well as information about their colleagues, voter records, or administrative tools.”
5. Each week, more and more information regarding Trump’s complete disregard for the rule of law is uncovered by multiple investigations. At Mar-a-Lago, an employee revealed the order to move documents came from the ex-president himself. In New York, he is forming a new company… all to attempt to avoid the law.
-
- Top point to make: Donald Trump is a criminal, and no one is above the law, including former presidents, members of Congress, or other elected officials. Donald Trump must be held accountable.
-
- If you read one thing: Politico, 10/13/22: Trump Organization assets should be frozen, New York attorney general asks court. “‘Since we filed this sweeping lawsuit last month, Donald Trump and the Trump Organization have continued those same fraudulent practices and taken measures to evade responsibility,’ she said in a statement. ‘Today, we are seeking an immediate stop to these actions because Mr. Trump should not get to play by different rules.’”
Expert voices
Elaine C. Kamarck, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institute and the founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management, and Norman Eisen, senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at Brookings Institute: “The 2022 midterms may well be the first elections ever where the elections themselves are on the ballot. Well over 300 candidates across a variety of races this fall are perpetuating former President Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him and that American elections are deeply flawed. Although no one has ever found proof of widespread and/or systematic fraud in the 2020 presidential election (as former Attorney General Bill Barr among others affirmed), the persistent and high-volume repetition by Trump and his high-profile surrogates has convinced many other Republicans that election was stolen. For many who don’t actually believe Trump’s assertions, the fact that he made belief in the ‘Big Lie’ a condition of his support for one Republican over another in the primaries, led them to mimic Trump…So far, we have been able to identify 345 candidates who will be on the ballot in November who have expressed election denial beliefs—false claims that the presidential election in 2020 was flawed…As one can see, more than half of the election deniers look like they will win their races.” Brookings
Nancy MacLean, William H. Chafe distinguished professor of history and public policy at Duke University: “We all live in states. And they are diverging more rapidly than we can track, in a manner that exposes Justice Kavanaugh’s happy talk about how this court’s decisions will work in practice as cynical in the extreme. One conclusion is inescapable: The war for democracy in America will be lost—or won—in the states. The reality in the U.S. today is the opposite of what Kavanaugh avowed. Federalism is not the solution to our problems. Federalism is the problem.” The New Republic
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: “‘Election denialism is a form of corruption,’ said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and a historian at New York University. ‘The party has now institutionalized this form of lying, this form of rejection of results. So it’s institutionalized illegal activity. These politicians are essentially conspiring to make party dogma the idea that it’s possible to reject certified results.’” Daily Kos
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law, re: Trump’s reported idea to try to cut a deal to exchange materials at Mar-a-Lago for documents from the FBI’s 2016 campaign Russia investigation: “This suggests Trump’s motive for stealing classified documents & hiding them at Mar-a-Lago: They gave him leverage to pressure the govt to try getting his way. Watch him try to use the top-secret information he still has hidden away to avoid prosecution!” Tweet
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “While motive is not an element prosecutors have to prove to convict, being able to establish it goes a long way to helping a jury understand a crime & deciding to convict. And here, it helps to establish Trump’s knowledge of what was in his possession & his intent to hold onto it.” Tweet
Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor emeritus: “ICYMI: My explanation on @Lawrence on MSNBC on Oct 11 of why the only questions for AG Garland are no longer ‘whether’ but ‘when,’ ‘where,’ and ‘for which crimes’” Tweet | MSNBC Video
Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 professor of American History at Princeton University, if Donald Trump is president again: “‘I think it would be the end of the republic,’ says Princeton University professor Sean Wilentz, one of the historians President Biden consulted in August about America’s teetering democracy. ‘It would be a kind of overthrow from within. … It would be a coup of the way we’ve always understood America.’” Washington Post (Magazine): What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.
Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University: “America is already gripped by an unprecedented level of what political scientists call ‘pernicious polarization’ — stoked and exploited by Trump — and a second Trump term could make it dangerously worse, says Jennifer McCoy, a political science professor at Georgia State University who co-authored a study of the phenomenon for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. No other established democracy since at least 1950 has been so polarized for so long. In nearly half of the dozens of countries McCoy studied, the next step after pernicious polarization was either ‘electoral autocracy’ — where votes are cast but don’t necessarily confer power — or outright ‘democratic collapse.’ ‘It’s extremely worrisome; we’re in uncharted territory,’ McCoy told me. ‘If Trump does come back, I think it would severely deepen the crisis that we face.’” Washington Post (Magazine): What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.
Larry Diamond, senior fellow in global democracy at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University: “For those studying the implications of these trends, ‘there’s no scenario that worries us more than that the wheels just come off completely from the restraints against violence in the United States,’ says Diamond, of Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute. ‘My biggest concern is what citizens would do to citizens, and what citizens might do to legitimately constituted government authority.’” Washington Post (Magazine): What Will Happen to America if Trump Wins Again? Experts Helped Us Game It Out.
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Trump filed a civil lawsuit to try and kneecap a lawful criminal prosecution. He very nearly did, at least for a while, with the help of Judge Cannon. Cannon took the unprecedented step of entering an injunction that interfered with a criminal investigation while it was in progress. The 11th Circuit put us back on more solid legal ground by staying parts of her order and permitting the criminal investigation to proceed, like it would have against any other subject of an investigation. There is no reason for the Supreme Court to reward Trump for obstructing and delaying that investigation. Hopefully they will see it that way and let DOJ proceed with its investigation while the 11th Circuit handles the appeal it agreed to expedite last week.” Civil Discourse
Laurence Tribe, Harvard Law professor emeritus: “Day by day the evidence that proves Trump personally orchestrated the theft and concealment of top secret documents becomes stronger. Any shadow of a doubt about his guilt is rapidly vanishing.” Tweet
Protect Democracy and Citizen Data: “We found that between April and July, the share of Americans who believed that Joe Biden won the 2020 election increased by 5%. We saw declines in the share of people who did not believe he won the election, and in those who had doubts. Many of those surveyed who held onto their doubts or Big Lie beliefs changed their original view that Jan. 6 was a peaceful protest. Nearly twice the number of Americans who view the 2020 election as “stolen” and Jan. 6 as peaceful now view the events of Jan. 6 as a violent attempt to overthrow the government. As the hearings continued, we also saw an increase in the proportion of Americans who viewed the committee hearings as fair and who believed that the committee’s recommendations should be taken seriously. This trend coincided with an increase in awareness about the hearings, suggesting that the more people learned, the more they came to trust.” TPM: The Jan. 6 Committee Is Having A Measurable Impact On Voter Attitudes | Tweet
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, historian at New York University: ““Election denial” is an insufficient term because rejecting certified electoral results is not really a belief (other than the belief that respecting election results is for the weak) but a practice that, as we saw on Jan. 6, has real-world outcomes. An entire political party decided to subvert the will of the people and seize power illegally on Jan. 6, even if Capitol Police officers had to die for that to happen. Autocratic (or fascist) takeover may be a better term than election denial to convey the corrupt intent and violent consequences of the collective conspiracy among GOP politicians and operatives to refute the results of the 2020 election and all future elections that don’t go their way.” Lucid
Elie Honig, former federal and state prosecutor: “Media: @eliehonig to @andersoncooper: ‘The tag line we’ve been hearing from the @January6thCmte is that #DonaldTrump remains ‘a clear and present danger to #democracy.’ That’s a call up the block to @TheJusticeDept. They understand that … consequences will fall to the #DoJ.’” Porter Anderson Tweet
Laurence Tribe, professor emeritus at Harvard Law: “The hearing is putting together so compelling a case that Trump personally schemed to overturn the election results that his refusal to testify will obviously confirm his guilt.” Tweet
Julian Zelizer, historian at Princeton University: “The theme of today’s 1/6 commit[t]ee: the multi-part plan wasn’t chaos, it wasn’t “delusion,” nor was it a leader who lost control of events. This was a premediated, coordinated, and intentional effort to overturn an election that Trump and his team understood he had lost.” Tweet
Joyce Vance, former US attorney: “Trump planned, before the election, to declare victory if he lost. He’s a crook. Whether or not his supporters will ever be convinced of it, the country deserves justice for the crimes he committed against it.” Tweet
Renato Mariotti, former federal prosecutor: “The U.S. Secret Service texts regarding weapons among the crowd on January 6th corroborates Cassidy Hutchinson’s key testimony that Trump was told that the crowd was armed and that he responded that they weren’t there to kill him but would be marching to the Capitol.” Tweet
Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW): “Evidence that there was a known and understood plan for Donald Trump to claim victory on election night, despite him and his and the VP’s staff knowing that the real results would not be known then, is crucial for intent to show an illegal effort to obstruct government functions.” Tweet
Barbara McQuade, former US attorney: “Moving documents to hide them from DOJ is the kind of aggravating factor that would make Trump’s conduct an indictable offense.” Tweet
Norman Eisen, senior fellow at The Brookings Institution: “their last major piece of unfinished business: establishing that the attempted coup they have documented never ended, simply evolved—and is now targeting our elections and our democracy. It consists of the Trump-led election denier movement that is seeking electoral office to do in the future what failed in 2020: elevate Trump or other GOP candidates whether they actually win or not. The Committee needs to lay out a roadmap of the evidence against Trump and others for prosecutors, civil litigants, and regulators such as state bars. Whether they make formal referrals matters less than presenting the relevant evidence in detailed form—a 21st-century version of the Watergate Road Map.” The New Republic
Kimberly Wehle, former assistant U.S. attorney: “According to an analysis by FiveThirtyEight, 60 percent of Americans who vote in November will have at least one election denier on the ballot. Of the 552 Republicans running for office, 201 fully deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election. In the House of Representatives, 118 election-denier candidates “have at least a 95 percent chance of winning.” If the committee is serious about saving democracy from a successful re-do of Jan. 6th, perhaps it should use its precious remaining weeks of life to turn its focus on colleagues in the Republican party who appear to be hellbent on destroying democracy, regardless of what Trump does in 2024.” The Bulwark
