When the Republican National Committee recently described the events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse,” it ripped the lid off the range of evasions that Republicans are using to shield Donald Trump. Some openly lent support to the RNC’s move. Others did warn such language could harm the GOP’s midterm chances, but said little to nothing about Trump himself.
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Appallingly few said outright the following: Trump sought to overturn an election loss he knew perfectly well was valid, to remain in power illegitimately. And how many have indicated this should be disqualifying in a leader of their party?
Now that the House select committee examining Jan. 6 has officially declared that Trump might have committed crimes associated with the insurrection attempt, these sorts of evasions will — or should — be a lot harder to get away with.
The idea that Trump knew he’d lost the election, yet tried to overturn it anyway, is central to a new filing that the committee has submitted to a U.S. district court in California. It’s in connection with a lawsuit filed against the committee by John Eastman, author of the infamous Trump coup memo.
As the filing puts it, “evidence and information available to the Committee establishes a good-faith belief that Mr. Trump and others may have engaged in criminal and/or fraudulent acts.”
The filing argues that Trump might be vulnerable to the criminal charge of obstructing an official proceeding in connection with his effort to subvert the congressional count of presidential electors. It amasses a wealth of evidence that Trump did this while knowing claims of a stolen election were nonsense.
For instance, the filing notes that Trump’s attorney general publicly announced that the Justice Department had found no serious fraud. It says the committee has collected information demonstrating that department officials privately advised Trump of this as well. It notes that Republican election officials also confirmed this for Trump, and that extensive media fact-checks also demonstrated this beyond any doubt.
Here’s why this matters: Because in spite of knowing all this, Trump continued to press his vice president, Mike Pence, to abuse his powers to delay the electoral count. And Trump and his co-conspirators also sought to do this in other ways, by trying to get friendly state legislators to send sham electors, and by leaning on at least one GOP senator to delay it while violence raged.
And of course, Trump incited the mob to go after Pence, which could amount to an effort to weaponize his supporters to intimidate Pence into disrupting the electoral count, which Pence had refused to do.
To demonstrate criminality, it must be shown that Trump corruptly tried to carry this out, i.e., that he did so knowingly on fraudulent pretenses, which is what the filing seeks to illustrate. (The filing also suggests Trump might be similarly vulnerable to criminal charges of conspiring to defraud the United States.)
“Knowing that what he was saying is fraudulent is essential to any case,” Barbara McQuade, a former federal prosecutor who has written extensively about Trump’s potential criminality, told me. “This filing crystallizes the evidence that he had fraudulent intent.”
All this telegraphs what’s coming. When the Jan. 6 committee holds public hearings, it will seek to illustrate in great detail, before the nation, that Trump fully understood that he had legitimately lost the election, yet sought to pressure his vice president into violating his official duty to overturn it.
It might even persuasively demonstrate that, in whipping up the mob, Trump tried to wield intimidation and violence to complete the job where the procedural coup had failed. The committee does not bring charges, but this filing shows how it will likely urge the Justice Department to do so, and the department might even investigate such charges.
The key point here is this: The truth about Trump’s true insurrectionist intent will be demonstrated with ever more clarity in the coming weeks and months. When that happens, how will Republicans manage to muster up the same old evasions?
Republicans like to say the rioters should be prosecuted where they committed crimes, while dodging on whether Trump and his co-conspirators should be held accountable for their role in manipulating the rank and file into carrying out those acts. When Trump’s role becomes unavoidably clear, that evasion will become tantamount to saying only the foot soldiers in the insurrection should be held accountable, even as the generals should not.
As it is, the fact that so many Republicans continue to treat Trump as a valid party leader — let alone a potential 2024 standard-bearer — even as all this is now on the public record, exposes deep rot inside the party. And when this gets worse, it’s likely that Trump loyalists will be driven ever deeper into treating him as a martyr and a victim of overzealous investigations.
We have to hope that at that point, saner Republicans will call for a serious reckoning. But there aren’t any particularly good reasons to be optimistic that it will happen.
