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In the eighth and final January 6 committee hearing that aired in prime time Thursday night (though not on Fox News), members of the panel connected the dots, and presented the goods. Here’s what we now know:
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Disgraced former President Donald Trump ignored a slew of pleas from his inner circle to call off the Capitol rioters. Members of congress, his aides, and his own daughter Ivanka, pleaded with Trump to call off the violence as it unfolded (which he was watching on television, of course) but he not only ignored them, he told them he did not want to pursue any sort of intervention. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the committee’s two Republicans, referred to Trump’s conversation with his then-chief of staff Mark Meadows, saying, “He told Mark Meadows that the rioters were doing what they should be doing and the rioters understood they were doing what President Trump wanted them to do.” Trumpeven initially refused several attempts by staff to get him to tweet a plea to “stay peaceful”, acquiescing only when the suggestion came from Ivanka. Even on January 7, in a taped address, Trump refused to say the election was over.
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The president never placed a call to law enforcement or national security. Nada. Silence. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, expressed dismay with Trump’s response in an audio recording of his deposition: “You’re the commander in chief — you’ve got an assault going on in the Capitol of the United States of America and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?” Yep, zero. From basically all accounts, the president watched Fox News footage of the insurrection unfolding from a White House dining room, wholly unmoved to act. In fact, the panel revealed that the White House phone logs and presidential daily diary were left blank during the “critical period” when the Capitol was under attack. Meanwhile, Vice President Pence’s Secret Service feared for their lives. A White House security official who had access to Secret Service radio calls that day, said that the agents protecting Pence were extremely fearful (due to all of the “Hang Pence” chants, probz) to the point that some called family members to say goodbye.
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Josh Hawley is a little bitch. Despite then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s attempt to keep his caucus from joining an effort to reject electors in December 2020, Hawley was the first senator to defy him, in an effort to pander to Trump’s base. On the day of January 6, Hawley gave an infamous fist pump as he entered the Capitol in support of the MAGA chuds outside, people who would forcibly break into the halls of Congress later that day. Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA) juxtaposed that photo of Hawley, with the extremely-funny video of Hawley running away from the same protesters he had encouraged to riot. The committee slipped that in just for fun to show the laughable hypocrisy of the cowards behind the Big Lie, and to single out Hawley for his leading role in the coup. As Kinzinger tweeted, “There would not have been as much oxygen to trumps[sic] coup plan without Fistpump McRunpants.” Savage. KinZINGER is right.
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Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), the other of the two committee Republicans and its vice chair, gave the hearing’s closing remarks, and firmly nailed Trump’s coffin.
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Following the presentation of all the committee’s evidence, Cheney said, "In our hearing tonight, you saw an American president faced with a stark and unmistakable choice between right and wrong. There was no ambiguity, no nuance. Donald Trump made a purposeful choice to violate his oath of office.” One of the panel’s implicit goals is to stamp out a potential 2024 Trump reelection campaign, which Cheney nodded to, asking, “Can a president who is willing to make the choices Donald Trump made during the violence of Jan. 6 ever be trusted with any position of authority in our great nation again?" Certainly, after six weeks of hearings, Trump is politically wounded and in bigger legal jeopardy than ever. Some of his underlings are even starting to face real consequences.
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Punctuating an ongoing sideshow to the hearings, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon was found guilty on two counts of contempt of Congress for failing to comply with his testimony and document subpoenas from the committee. Bannon's sentencing is scheduled for October 21 when he will face a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 30 days and up to one year behind bars. Gotta say I love this song.
Additional public hearings are slated for September, the House committee said, but for now, they did what they set out to accomplish: an unequivocal statement supported by volumes of evidence that Trump is to blame for the violence, purposefully violated his oath of office, and lawmakers must now take measures to prevent another January 6. Hopefully, with the fate of the country in mind, they will.
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This week on Imani State of Mind, it's time to talk about the real side of your relationship.
Whether you are married, dating, or engaged, relationships take work! In their newest episode, the ladies take a deeper look into how your spousal relationship plays a role on your mind - for better or for worse.
Listen to new episodes of Imani State Of Mind every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.
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An off-duty corrections officer has been charged in the killing of a teenager who was playing with a water gun in the Bronx, NY. 18-year-old Raymond Chaluisant was found unconscious and unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the face. New York City Correction Commissioner Louis Molina said that officer Dion Middleton has been suspended without pay and faces termination if he is convicted (yeah we would hope so). Authorities have not indicated a motive, and there is no evidence as yet that Chaluisant fired or aimed the water gun at Middleton, not that it would make a difference as it was literally a toy. The victim’s older sister told the New York Daily News that her brother and his friends were having a water-gun fight in the 90-degree heat. The incident echoes the 2014 murder of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old Cleveland boy killed by a White police officer for playing in a park with a toy gun, and is another grim reminder of the ongoing epidemic of police violence against unarmed Black men and boys in America.
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Wildfires in much of Western Europe have seemed to abate, but have accelerated in Slovenia.
An ongoing drought in the greater Las Vegas, NV, area, has forced officials to cap the size of new swimming pools at single-family homes to about the size of a three-car garage, or 600 square feet.
New documents in a House Oversight and Reform committee report illustrate how the Trump administration tried to manipulate the Census for partisan electoral gain, and was almost successful in doing so. Trump’s former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross lied in his testimony about the purpose of the citizenship question, among many other things.
Disgraced former president Donald Trump and his former Vice President Mike Pence both held campaign events in Arizona Friday for the state’s upcoming Republican gubernatorial primary, each having endorsed opposing candidates.
A train on Boston’s Orange Line caught fire over the Mystic River yesterday forcing riders to kick through windows and jump out of the train car. One woman jumped from the bridge where the train had stopped into the river, declined medical assistance from an emergency response boat, and swam to shore.
Mayors in New York and Washington, DC, have asked the Biden administration to help them address what they say is a surge of asylum-seeking migrants in their cities.
The head of the California National Guard, Maj. Gen. David Baldwin, who presided over allegations that his officers engaged in abuse of authority, homophobia, antisemitism, and racism, will step down at the end of the month.
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Pope Francis is set to begin his weeklong visit to Canada this Saturday, largely in order to apologize for abuses in Catholic-run residential schools for indigenous children, meant to sever them from their tribal, family, and religious bonds. From the nineteenth century into much of the twentieth, Canada’s government collaborated with Catholic and Protestant churches to run residential schools populated with Native children who were frequently taken from their homes by force. These schools were not designed to educate, but to weaken tribal identities and Indigenous resistance to land grabs, according to a 2015 report. In short, cultural genocide. The majority of the 139 schools in question were Catholic-run. Schools were unsanitary and unsafe, thousands of children died of disease and as the result of fires, among other causes, and physical and sexual abuse were rampant. But the true horrors of these residential schools gained new coverage and urgency last year after archaeologists found evidence of hundreds of unmarked graves. This spring, Pope Francis met with a Canadian Indigenous delegation and apologized “for the deplorable conduct of those members of the Catholic Church,” involved with the schools, and agreed to requests from survivors to make an apology on Canadian soil. Although Catholic and Protestant church leaders alike have been issuing apologies for decades, Pope Francis’s visit is the first of its kind, and shows the level of commitment he has to this cause, as he has recently canceled other trips due to health problems.
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Lululemon workers in Washington, DC, filed for a union election. Solidarity to our stewards of yoga pants!
Ford is trying to solve the current E.V. supply chain problem by importing a huge supply of cheaper, safer, more durable iron batteries, which could accelerate demand for mass-market electric vehicles.
Lehigh County, PA, one of the largest in the state, began divesting its assets from Wells Fargo because of the bank’s donations to anti-abortion groups.
Gov. John Carney (D-DE) will sign a bill today allowing Delaware voters to send their ballots through the mail in all future elections. Republicans immediately sued, obviously.
An SBNation writer calculated how fast Sen. Josh Hawley could run the 40-yard dash based on how fast he ran away during the January 6 insurrection, which is pretty fun.
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