By Greg Sargent
Columnist |
June 9, 2022 at 11:49 a.m. EDT
With the House committee hearings examining Donald Trump’s insurrection set to kick off Thursday night, the question must be asked: Is another John Dean moment actually possible?
Such a moment would achieve heightened, bipartisan recognition that Trump and his co-conspirators committed an extraordinary crime against our political order and way of life, one that demands introspection and extensive reform.
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Dean’s performance during the Watergate hearings will be hard to match. John W. Dean III, as President Richard M. Nixon’s White House counsel, riveted the country with testimony about extensive corruption, including perjury, document shredding and obstruction of justice, captured in his line that the scandal was “a cancer on the presidency.”
But some of the witnesses who might testify at the hearings examining the events of Jan. 6, 2021, might still produce moments that break through in a meaningful way. The possibilities being reported suggest surprises are coming:
Brad Raffensperger. The Georgia secretary of state is reportedly in talks with the committee about offering public testimony. Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s pressure on him to “find” votes to help Trump steal the election. That resistance was a display of civic virtue from a Republican at a critical moment and in the face of extraordinary corruption.
All that is already on audio. But if Raffensperger testifies on live television, it could graphically illustrate to a vastly larger audience a fundamental fact: Trump and his allies actually did conspire to overturn the election in nakedly, straightforwardly corrupt fashion.
That tends to get lost in technical talk about the congressional electoral count and in misdirection about whether Trump “believed” there was fraud and merely exercised his legal options in response. Here a Republican could tell us plainly that Trump tried to remain in power illegitimately by manufacturing phony votes to override real ones.
“Raffensperger, if he testifies, is John Dean for the streaming era,” governance scholar Norman Eisen told me. Raffensperger could detail knowledge of corruption that has Trump under criminal investigation, Eisen said, as an “uber-conservative who turns on the head of his own party.”
Cassidy Hutchinson. A top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson has already testified to the committee and is expected to do so publicly. Hutchinson is the aide who confirmed to the committee that on Jan. 6, Trump made some kind of remark about Vice President Mike Pence deserving to be hanged.
Hutchinson might address that moment live. She could also testify about her direct knowledge of Meadows’s efforts to help Trump steal the election by sabotaging the electoral count in Congress, as MSNBC’s Joyce Vance and Barbara McQuade write, and possibly about Meadows’s urging of Trump to call off the rioters on Jan. 6, which Trump refused to do for over two hours.
Here’s why this matters: The hearings will ideally illustrate that the real reason Trump didn’t calm the violence is that he essentially weaponized the mob to finish the job on the weeks-long procedural coup, through the intimidation of Pence or worse.
Here again, this gets lost in talk about how Trump might have allowed the violence to rage as a sore loser, out of anger or because he’s “crazy.” Hutchinson could drive home that Trump actually saw the violence in coldly instrumental terms — as critical to completing a coup against the United States.
Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue. The committee has approached these former senior Justice Department officials to appear because they can testify directly to the corrupt pressure Trump and his allies placed on the department as part of the coup attempt.
That pressure was designed to get top officials to use the department’s law enforcement stature to manufacture the impression of widespread voter fraud. This would have created the pretext for Pence to delay the electoral count in Congress, and then for states to revisit the voting to certify sham electors for Trump.
Yet again, such realities tend to get lost in a fog of euphemism. We keep hearing that Trump was flailing incompetently mainly because he couldn’t accept his loss, or that there’s no reason to care because a few officials showed virtue and held the line against him.
What needs to be driven home is that the plot to overturn our political and constitutional order was concerted, detailed, organized and far-reaching, involving efforts to corrupt many parts of government and weaponize them against the American people themselves.
As Dean told me, the Watergate hearings drove home that Nixon had “no moral anchor at all.” Similarly, Dean said, witnesses at the Jan. 6 hearings may successfully drive home that Trump isn’t just a “crazy man” but also a “diabolical man.”
The hearing Thursday night will also feature a documentary filmmaker who reportedly has extensive new footage of preparations for the violent storming of the Capitol, including among Trump-supporting paramilitary-type organizations.
That will be powerful, but it might be that a Watergate-level breakthrough moment and national reckoning are simply impossible these days. Still, there’s plainly a lot of room to enlarge the public’s understanding of what happened.
Hopefully, the committee and its witnesses will make clear the fact that the Jan. 6 violence wasn’t some isolated spasm of disaffected rage. It was the culmination of a long, sordid narrative with Trump at its center, enabled by Republicans throughout and covered up by them since, all amounting to an extraordinary betrayal of the people of this country.
Columnist |
June 9, 2022 at 11:49 a.m. EDT
With the House committee hearings examining Donald Trump’s insurrection set to kick off Thursday night, the question must be asked: Is another John Dean moment actually possible?
Such a moment would achieve heightened, bipartisan recognition that Trump and his co-conspirators committed an extraordinary crime against our political order and way of life, one that demands introspection and extensive reform.
Sign up for a weekly roundup of thought-provoking ideas and debates
Dean’s performance during the Watergate hearings will be hard to match. John W. Dean III, as President Richard M. Nixon’s White House counsel, riveted the country with testimony about extensive corruption, including perjury, document shredding and obstruction of justice, captured in his line that the scandal was “a cancer on the presidency.”
But some of the witnesses who might testify at the hearings examining the events of Jan. 6, 2021, might still produce moments that break through in a meaningful way. The possibilities being reported suggest surprises are coming:
Brad Raffensperger. The Georgia secretary of state is reportedly in talks with the committee about offering public testimony. Raffensperger famously rebuffed Trump’s pressure on him to “find” votes to help Trump steal the election. That resistance was a display of civic virtue from a Republican at a critical moment and in the face of extraordinary corruption.
All that is already on audio. But if Raffensperger testifies on live television, it could graphically illustrate to a vastly larger audience a fundamental fact: Trump and his allies actually did conspire to overturn the election in nakedly, straightforwardly corrupt fashion.
That tends to get lost in technical talk about the congressional electoral count and in misdirection about whether Trump “believed” there was fraud and merely exercised his legal options in response. Here a Republican could tell us plainly that Trump tried to remain in power illegitimately by manufacturing phony votes to override real ones.
“Raffensperger, if he testifies, is John Dean for the streaming era,” governance scholar Norman Eisen told me. Raffensperger could detail knowledge of corruption that has Trump under criminal investigation, Eisen said, as an “uber-conservative who turns on the head of his own party.”
Cassidy Hutchinson. A top aide to then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson has already testified to the committee and is expected to do so publicly. Hutchinson is the aide who confirmed to the committee that on Jan. 6, Trump made some kind of remark about Vice President Mike Pence deserving to be hanged.
Hutchinson might address that moment live. She could also testify about her direct knowledge of Meadows’s efforts to help Trump steal the election by sabotaging the electoral count in Congress, as MSNBC’s Joyce Vance and Barbara McQuade write, and possibly about Meadows’s urging of Trump to call off the rioters on Jan. 6, which Trump refused to do for over two hours.
Here’s why this matters: The hearings will ideally illustrate that the real reason Trump didn’t calm the violence is that he essentially weaponized the mob to finish the job on the weeks-long procedural coup, through the intimidation of Pence or worse.
Here again, this gets lost in talk about how Trump might have allowed the violence to rage as a sore loser, out of anger or because he’s “crazy.” Hutchinson could drive home that Trump actually saw the violence in coldly instrumental terms — as critical to completing a coup against the United States.
Jeffrey Rosen and Richard Donoghue. The committee has approached these former senior Justice Department officials to appear because they can testify directly to the corrupt pressure Trump and his allies placed on the department as part of the coup attempt.
That pressure was designed to get top officials to use the department’s law enforcement stature to manufacture the impression of widespread voter fraud. This would have created the pretext for Pence to delay the electoral count in Congress, and then for states to revisit the voting to certify sham electors for Trump.
Yet again, such realities tend to get lost in a fog of euphemism. We keep hearing that Trump was flailing incompetently mainly because he couldn’t accept his loss, or that there’s no reason to care because a few officials showed virtue and held the line against him.
What needs to be driven home is that the plot to overturn our political and constitutional order was concerted, detailed, organized and far-reaching, involving efforts to corrupt many parts of government and weaponize them against the American people themselves.
As Dean told me, the Watergate hearings drove home that Nixon had “no moral anchor at all.” Similarly, Dean said, witnesses at the Jan. 6 hearings may successfully drive home that Trump isn’t just a “crazy man” but also a “diabolical man.”
The hearing Thursday night will also feature a documentary filmmaker who reportedly has extensive new footage of preparations for the violent storming of the Capitol, including among Trump-supporting paramilitary-type organizations.
That will be powerful, but it might be that a Watergate-level breakthrough moment and national reckoning are simply impossible these days. Still, there’s plainly a lot of room to enlarge the public’s understanding of what happened.
Hopefully, the committee and its witnesses will make clear the fact that the Jan. 6 violence wasn’t some isolated spasm of disaffected rage. It was the culmination of a long, sordid narrative with Trump at its center, enabled by Republicans throughout and covered up by them since, all amounting to an extraordinary betrayal of the people of this country.
