10 June 2022

"There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain."

This was Republican Liz Cheney's comment to Republican Senators who have remained faithful to Donald Trump and who said that the January 6 hearings were going to be a "nothing burger."

Night One was definitely not a nothing burger.  The nine-member House panel pinned blame for the January 6 violence squarely on Trump, who knew he had lost the 2020 presidential election but lied to the American people that his defeat was due to fraud and then actively worked to subvert democracy.

After conducting 1,000 interviews and gathering 140,000 documents over the course of the year, the committee launched its presentation with a blunt reminder of the vicious violence unleashed by the mob that day.  We assume that we've seen pretty much everything there is to see about the riot at the capitol, but the video they started the proceedings with contained a lot of new stuff, more violent, even, than we have seen before. 

With so many interviews to choose from, it was clear that everyone but Trump felt that Biden won the election.

Attorney General William Barr called Trump's insistence that there was voting irregularity "bull shit" and even devoted daughter Ivanka said she respected Barr and believed what he said was correct.

The committee made it clear that Trump had invited by tweet the far-right, neo-fascist male organization, The Proud Boys, to join him on January 6 and that things would be "wild." Hotels in DC were full.

And though everyone told the president that he needed to ask the people rioting to stop, that he needed to call in help, he did nothing.   It was actually Pence that was issuing the orders for the military to send the National Guard.  Instead Trump sat at the TV and watched what was going on and some say he was "giddy" and re-watched things that got particularly violent. At one point he agreed that perhaps hanging Mike Pence was a good idea.

The committee set up the series of hearings that will be held through June with all sorts of promises of  things that will be discussed further.  All the major networks covered the hearing except FOX, which not only did not cover it, but Tucker Carlson reported for an hour without commercial, so there would be no chance for someone to turn away from FOX to see what was being broadcast on other networks.

I don't know what the result of this hearing is going to be, but if you haven't seen session one, please check out the other sessions.  It's a real eye-opener.  (Next session will be Monday morning, 10 a.m., east coast time)