Dark and unsettling: The 1/6 committee is homing in on whether Trump and his co-conspirators fully understood the attack as an instrumental weapon to help carry out his procedural coup. Seeking Jim Jordan's testimony is key to this. I laid this out here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Jim Jordan may be able to shed light on:
*Trump's conduct while the mob attack unfolded -- did Trump indicate he wanted it to continue?
*How Trump and his co-conspirators sought to use fake fraud claims as a deliberate pretext for the procedural coup:
If you want to understand the potential criminal implications of this idea -- that Trump and his co-conspirators may have knowingly understood the violence as a weapon for helping carry out the procedural coup -- read this piece by @tribelaw and company:
@RonWyden Manchin cannot be moved by the immiseration of his own constituents. But he does want to be seen as standing for a good economy in a general sense.
Goldman's finding provides a weapon here.
“Instead of a Biden boom, we could have a Manchin slowdown."
The 1/6 committee's report on Mark Meadows is extraordinary -- it's a detailed blueprint of a coup. Notably, it shows Meadows can testify to Trump's reaction to the violence as it unfolded. This is a huge element of what he's covering up. My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Key: The 1/6 committee discloses that it has "many messages" Meadows received urging him to get Trump to call off the rioters.
So Meadows is a witness to Trump's reaction to the violence in real time.
Here's what Meadows *does not* want to testify to:
How can Biden lead at the democracy summit without telling the truth about the authoritarian threat at home -- that it comes from the right and GOP? Will he really paper over his own party's utter failure to safeguard against that threat? My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden advisers are struggling with how to address our own democracy problems at the summit. SecState Blinken says he will use it to rally our "better angels" at home.
But this casts the problem as a failure of persuasion, when it's a failure of inaction:
Just awful: Steve Bannon is now ripping into David Perdue, who is *Trump's* candidate for Georgia governor, as too much of a squish to wage the war on democracy Bannon wants. This shows that the right is headed toward full-blown insurgency. My new piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
I had a fascinating conversation with Nicole Hemmer, a historian of conservative media, about Bannon.
Bannon is similar to Oliver North. Both parlayed their willingness to operate outside the law into a media following built around explicit insurgency:
David Perdue supported the lawsuit seeking to invalidate millions of Biden votes. He called for the firing of the Sec of State who rebuffed Trump's pressure to steal the election.
Yet Bannon still sees him as a squish. Only full blown insurgency will do: