ChiGoose

When we have sworn testimony from Trump’s inner circle that they knew he lost the election and told him constantly that the claims he made were false, I think it’s fair to draw the conclusion that those events did happen. These were people who were invested in Trump winning and they are testifying under oath. As to someone’s actual guilt, that’s something left to the judicial system. I try to be careful to state this in terms of “if it went to trial, a prosecutor would argue that…” or that something “might” satisfy the elements of a crime. I don’t think we have a smoking gun here that Trump organized a coup attempt yet. There is a lot of damning evidence about a lot of people, including Trump, but as I’ve stated, this isn’t a trial.

They are presenting evidence at the hearing, they cannot indict anyone for anything even if they believe someone to be responsible for a crime. So far, their referrals to the DoJ have been for contempt of Congress for people refusing the testify and not for any actions before or during Jan 6th. Chairman Benny Thompson said the other day that they were done sending referrals but Vice Chair Liz Cheney says she doesn’t think they are. So who knows? The committee is divided into several teams. One of those teams has a specific remit to assess the law enforcement failures and why they happened (See Blue Team) So far, we have had two hearings: one to give an overview of what we should expect and one that focused primarily on the election itself. Given that there are still several hearings to go and that one of the five teams is dedicated to figuring out why the security was not prepared, I would expect that they address that at some point.

Much like the Jan 6th committee is not a trial or judicial proceeding, it is also not an impeachment trial. The committee exists with the purpose to figure out how and why the events of Jan 6th happened and to potentially recommend legislation to prevent such incidents from happening in the future. The committee cannot indict Trump. It cannot impeach him. It cannot, in any way, shape, or form, hold him accountable. Its remit actually isn’t targeted at Trump at all, except that as they investigate, he ends up being the central figure. So as far as he bears any responsibility at all, the only thing the committee can actually do is to expose that and hope that the DoJ takes action.

This is a straw man argument and can be disregarded. To @Buffalo Timmy’s point: we’ve had two hearings of many. We did learn some new things in the hearing this week, but I would wait until it all plays out before jumping to any conclusions one way or the other.

Huh. Seems bad. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna33755

I'll do my best to answer your points, just bear in mind that my answers are based on how things *do* work and not necessarily how they *should* work. 1. House Select Committees House select committees are created by a resolution. There are no requirements that all select committees must meet certain requirements. They are defined by their resolutions. The original plan was to hold a bipartisan Joint Committee (which is a committee with members from both the Senate and the House) that was negotiated between Bennie Thompson (D) and John Katko (R), but that ended up being filibustered in the Senate. The Jan 6th committee resolution vested the appointment of members in the Speaker of the House, but 5 would be appointed after consultation with the minority leader. Kevin McCarthy announced the 5 members he wanted, but Pelosi told him she would reject Jim Jordan and Jim Banks. However, she would approve the other three. McCarthy then withdrew all of his nominations. We can quibble about the specifics of the qualifications of who was appointed and what "after consultation" requires, but those are the facts of how the committee was established. 2. House Subpoenas People subpoenaed by the committee could challenge the subpoena in court (and some have) but it would be an uphill battle to argue that "after consultation with the Minority leader" means that the minority leader gets to pick the people. As far as I am aware, nobody has successfully challenged a subpoena from the committee. 3. One Side of the Story / Perjury We need to be careful about comparisons to a trial. This is not a trial or even a judicial proceeding. Trump is not on trial here, and neither are people like Rudy Giuliani. They do not face a loss of liberty through the committee and are not entitled to the due process they would be entitled to at a trial or judicial proceeding. That being said, the witnesses are testifying under oath, so they are subject to perjury charges should they lie. When we are hearing differing arguments, those being made in the hearings and those being made in the media, it is important to note that people can lie in the media with little recourse whereas people lying to the committee give themselves legal exposure. It's not perfect by any means, but it is interesting to see at least one person reject a request to testify under oath and then say in the media that they were lied about. If the story the committee is getting is wrong, maybe they should have testified to that. 4. Outsider vs. Establishment This skirts close to the whole "deep state is after Trump" thing but I want to avoid that discussion because I don't think that was the intention of your point. Washington is a bureaucratic mess but part of that is because it would be impossible for one person to manage something the size of the US federal government. This definitely makes it hard for an outsider to succeed. On the other hand, someone with little to no experience in government would likely lack the skills and experience to be effective (which is why I did not support Obama - he had so little experience when he ran). Ultimately, this one probably comes down to opinion, but going by Occam's Razor, I just feel like it is more likely that Trump was looking for any excuse to declare that he won (putting his staff into a difficult position) than there was a web of people across his own campaign and the government invested in bringing him down. Many of the people who testified would benefit greatly from Trump winning, but when they were sworn in to tell the truth, they said that he lost.

It’s the classic plan of the last ~30 years: 1. Supply side tax cuts to benefit the rich explodes the deficit. 2. Scream about the deficit to justify cutting programs for the poor and middle class. 3. Rinse and repeat.

Remember that the committee was originally designed to be bipartisan until the GOP tanked that and the House had to do a select committee instead. Also, the founding rules of a committee have no bearing on the authority of Congressional subpoenas. To believe all of this is just a made-up witch hunt means you believe that the witnesses all perjured themselves. If that’s true, then the Pro-Trump people should provide proof of that. And finally, this whole “establishment hates Trump” thing in regards to this hearing means you must think that Trump is an absolute moron at hiring people. Basically every person who testified was either hired by Trump or appointed by him. He must truly be incompetent if he managed to hire dozens of people who were actually working to bring him down.

Honestly, I find all of this pretty fascinating and was going to watch the hearing anyway. But, there are so many people on this forum who espouse the debunked conspiracies and they would never sit through the hearing, so I figured I would type up some notes while watching it. Since the hearing was a solidly thorough debunking of the conspiracies, I was hoping that maybe seeing that Trump’s inner circle knew the claims were false might change a mind or two. Apparently, that was very naïve of me. I expect there will be little change here at PPP from people still claiming the election was stolen.

Ok, I don’t want to be mean because maybe English isn’t your first language or something, but this isn’t a criminal trial and it isn’t a civil trial. It’s not a trial, there isn’t a court, there’s no prosecution, there is no jury and there is no defense. This is a congressional fact finding committee with sworn testimony from witnesses speaking under the penalty of perjury. Please, take a moment and try to recognize that. I know not everybody is familiar with these nuances but it’s not *that* hard to understand.

Well, we now have sworn testimony from Trump’s inner circle that he lost the election, it wasn’t stolen and all of the theories being thrown out on PPP everyday are baseless conspiracies. That counts for something.

For maybe the hundredth time, this is not a judicial proceeding. There is no prosecution and there is no defense. It is a congressional fact-finding committee. I honestly don’t know why this is so difficult for people to grasp.

The main reason Congress doesn't work is because there is a significant political movement to ensure that it does not work and those that oppose this movement are wholly incompetent. Congress doesn't really *do* anything because doing anything meaningful would require satisfying the filibuster in the Senate. Since we have a two-party system, doing something bipartisan is bad and therefore, anything proposed by one party will generally be opposed by the other, regardless of the merits. One of the many exceptions to the filibuster is the reconciliation rule, which allows a majority threshold for bills that are only about money. This works because McConnell does not care about anything except power and the transfer of wealth to corporations and the donor class. He can accomplish his entire agenda through reconciliation and the party is fine with that. The Dems want to do things that they believe will make things better for people (give them healthcare, prevent businesses from taking advantage of them, etc). They can't do these things because they'll never have enough votes to beat the filibuster, so they torture the hell out of the language of the bills to try to make them qualify for reconciliation. And sometimes even that doesn't work. This is how you end up with a Congress that really doesn't do much legislating, which means a lot of the responsibility is thrown to the judicial system. This is the other part of the plan, and it's why McConnell blocked as many Obama judges as he could so there were a ton of vacancies for Trump to fill in when he won. It's also dramatically heated up any SCOTUS appointments because now much of our governance has to run through SCOTUS due to the complete dysfunction of Congress. And despite Chevron deference originally being a Reagan-era conservative thing, the current plan of having SCOTUS water it down or eliminate it means that even Executive Agencies will not have the power to carry out their mandate. That is, of course, exactly McConnell's plan. The Dems are too scared, lazy, or incompetent to do anything to fix this. So in the meantime, we have plenty of time for hearings and naming post offices.

At this point, I don't think the Dems could handle solving a 100 piece puzzle.

Pretty much, except the destination of all of the $250 million hasn't been made public as far as I'm aware. The hearing showed where about $7 million went. We know that there was no defense fund, so it'd be nice to learn where the remaining $243 million went. I would hazard a guess that the lifetime grifter and conman managed to siphon a good amount of that into his own pockets but we'll have to wait and see. Only $200K was revealed yesterday to go to a Trump property specifically.

Anyone who saw yesterday's testimony would know that the election wasn't stolen. Trump's people, under oath, said it wasn't. I would wager most of the GOP members of Congress cannot stand Trump (definitely in the Senate), but they will toe the line so long as it is profitable for them. I'm glad that at least Cheney isn't caving to the lunacy, even if it likely costs her her seat.

The Slack channel is called #social-watercooler. Really seems unlikely that's where policy decisions are made...

...and? The GOP does the same. Any candidate the Dems nominate will be decried as an anti-American socialist who wants to open the borders and destroy the police. In a two-party system, everything about elections is zero-sum and incentivizes our worst tendencies.

Is he? I would be surprised if most Dems think he's a hero. Like Liz Cheney, what I've seen from the Left is begrudging respect for doing the right thing. Then again, you get people who want attention and say crazy things like they are now Democrats or that the Dems should run Cheney on their 2024 ticket.

It doesn't. It does raise the question of why the Proud Boys would invite a documentarian if they were going to be committing crimes but there could be other reasons for it. Maybe they didn't think what they were doing was a crime. Or maybe they're stupid. We're talking about people with an initiation ritual of trying to name cereal brands while being beat up. The article raises the question, but it does not answer it.

I watched the second day of the Jan 6th hearings and thought I would put a recap here for people who do not have two hours to watch it. Due to the length, I may not be able to include every statement and witness, but will include the main witnesses and important testimony. When evaluating the testimony, I think it’s important to remember that the witnesses here were sworn in prior to testifying. Which means that if they lie, they expose themselves to perjury charges. I would keep that in mind when comparing it to people on Twitter or podcasts who have no penalty for lying. Also of note: the committee stated that it will release all of the materials from the hearing, though I have not seen it yet. I imagine they will post it to the Committee's website. Link to the hearing. RECAP: Eric Herschmann (former White House Lawyer): Never saw any evidence to sustain the Dominion allegations The claims were nuts and Rudy Giuliani never proved his allegations Matt Morgan (former Trump Campaign General Counsel): Assessed that the stolen election claims were not sufficient to be outcome changing Chris Stirewalt (Former Fox News Politics Editor): After the votes were counted, Joe Biden won the election In the 40-50 years of absentee ballots, Dems prefer early voting & absentee while GOP prefers election day. This is called the Red Mirage: election day results will start better for GOP and then shift as the absentee and early vote is tallied. We knew this was going to be more pronounced due to the pandemic and problematic because the Trump campaign was clear they wanted to exploit it. Fox News partnered with the Associated Press and the University of Chicago to build a better election forecasting device. As votes come in, they compare them to their model and the Arizona tallies matched their forecast exactly Calling Arizona was a unanimous decision by their team and they are proud for getting it right and beating the competition As of November 7th (four days after Election Day), there was essentially no chance that Trump could win Jason Miller (Trump Campaign Senior Advisor): Team was aware of the red mirage and was discussing it as the results started coming in The atmosphere in the room changed when Fox called Arizona While Giuliani wanted Trump to declare victory, Miller did not think it was appropriate given the results Bill Stepien (Trump Campaign Manager): Told Trump the early numbers would be good but would change during the night (red mirage). Tried to convince Trump that mail-in voting was a good thing. They can lock in votes early and not leave it to chance on election day The GOP had an advantage on the grassroots level that would give them an edge on getting the votes in Assigned Alex Cannon to look at the Arizona claims: baseless (claims of illegal voters were just people overseas voting legally) Bill Barr (Attorney General): Trump claimed fraud without evidence because the results were changing as the night went on. Barr was not concerned as they knew this would happen (red mirage) Trump’s claim that the election was stolen was “bull####” Barr had his team look into any allegations of fraud they received and determined they were without merit, bogus, and based on misinformation. Barr told Trump that the DoJ was looking into the claims but found them to be without merit Mark Meadows and Jared Kushner told Barr they were working to turn Trump around On Trump’s claims about Detroit: Instead of counting precincts, Detroit brings all of the ballots to a central location for tallying; meaning there would be trucks bringing in ballots from around the city at all hours Also, Trump did better in Detroit than they had expected On Dominion claims: idiotic and disturbing. Absolutely zero basis for the allegations Trump had a report that he claimed proved he won. Barr read it and found it to be amateurish and lacked supporting evidence for its claims. Barr: “If he really believes this stuff, he’s become detached from reality” Barr’s opinion is that the election was not stolen and there was no evidence that it was On 2,000 Mules: “In a nutshell, we were unimpressed with it.” The cellphone data was unimpressive. Mentioned that a contractor said their truck alone probably accounted for 6 of the “mules” since their work route took them by a drop box regularly Even if the ballots were harvested, courts would not throw away legitimate votes. They would still open the ballots, do the verification process and tabulate the legal votes On Philadelphia claims: Turnout was in line with the rest of PA. Trump actually ran weaker than other GOP candidates on the ballot (behind 2 of the statewide candidates and the congressional delegation). That does not suggest fraud On allegations that more people voted absentee in PA than requested ballots: They compared apples to oranges: took the requested absentee ballots for the primary and compared to the absentee votes in the general. When looking at apples to apples, there was no discrepancy Jeffrey Rosen (Acting Attorney General): “There were instances where the president would say ‘I heard this, etc.’ and we were in position to say we have looked at that and you’re getting bad information. It’s not correct. It’s been debunked” Derek Lyons (Counselor to the President): Campaign told Trump that the claims of fraud were unsubstantiated and could not be the basis for challenging the election Alex Cannon (Trump Campaign Lawyer): Told Peter Navarro that the hand recount in Georgia would resolve any issues with the technology or Dominion, and that Chris Krebbs (CISA) had released report that the technology was secure. Navarro told him that he and Krebbs were part of the Deep State working against Trump Had brief conversation with Mike Pence in November. Pence asked if he was finding anything with voter fraud. Cannon told him he was not finding anything sufficient to alter the course of the election. Pence thanked him Richard Donoghue (Acting Deputy Attorney General): Tried to be clear to Trump that after dozens of investigations and hundreds of interviews, the claims of fraud were not supported by the evidence. The info Trump was getting was false There were so many claims of fraud that when you debunked one, Trump would accept it but then ask about another one Claim of 68% error rate in Michigan: was actually 0.00063% Claim by PA truck driver of shipping ballots: Investigated who loaded and unloaded the truck, no evidence to support claim Claims about Georgia suitcase: Talked to the witnesses, there was no suitcase. If you watch the video closely, it’s an official lockbox Claims about scanning ballots multiple times: No evidence Claims that Native Americans were being paid to vote: No evidence BJ Pak (US Attorney for the Northern District of Georgia): Bill Barr asked him to look into a video from State Farm Arena that purported to prove fraud. Pak found the alleged suitcase was an official lockbox There was a mistake where they thought they were done counting for the night, so they sent the election watchers home and packed up. The Secretary of State corrected them and told them to continue counting There was no evidence to support the claim of widespread fraud in Georgia Pak left his position and was replaced by someone handpicked by Trump. They continued the investigations and found no evidence to support the claims Al Schmidt (City Commissioner of Philadelphia): On Claim of 8,000 dead voters: could not find evidence of even 8 They took every claim seriously, no matter how absurd it appeared When Trump tweeted about Schmidt by name, his family received threats that included the names and ages of his family as well as his home address and other personal details Ben Ginsburg (Leading GOP election lawyer for GOP presidential candidates since 2000): Normal course of action after an election is to analyze the precinct results to look for abnormalities and send people to ask questions Check with poll workers and observers to see if they found any irregularities (Trump campaign stated they had 50,000 observers) The problem for the Trump campaign was that the election was not close. In Arizona, they were down by ~10,000 votes. When Ginsburg argued Bush v Gore, the difference was 537 votes in 2000 That kind of gap is not made up in a recount The claim that the Trump campaign was not given the opportunity to provide evidence in court was false: about half of the 62 cases, there were discussions on the merits and in no instance did the court find the claim to be real There were post-election reviews in the battleground states that found no evidence of fraud Rep. Zoe Lofgren lead most of the hearing and also played video testimony from a staffer on the committee as well as some Trump campaign employees discussing the post-election fundraising. The main takeaways: Between Election Day and January 6th, the campaign sent millions of emails to supporters (as many as 25 per day) They encouraged supporters to donate to the Election Defense Fund to fight the election results Campaign staffers testified that there was no such fund, it was just a marketing gimmick They raised $250 million after the election Most of the money went to the Save America PAC created by Trump, which then disbursed funds to organizations such as a foundation run by Mark Meadows, a policy institute that employed former Trump campaign staff, the Trump Hotel Collection, and the Jan 6th rally. Lofgren stated that the donors deserve to know where their money went MY THOUGHTS / TAKEAWAYS: This is a pretty damning takedown of the election steal claims. As far as I can tell, all of the witnesses were Republicans and/or people hired/appointed by Trump, and despite their investigations, they could not find anything to support the claim that the election was stolen. I do not believe that it will change many minds, but having this on the record in sworn testimony (as opposed to people being able to lie about it on other mediums) is helpful. It is hard to swallow claims that all of these people were secretly working against Trump and, in fact, that claim would mean that Trump is utterly incompetent in hiring and appointing people if all of them end up working to bring him down. Also, the idea that they would all be lying under oath is difficult to believe as they would be in legal jeopardy should someone provide evidence that they are lying. For those hoping for an indictment of Trump himself, the testimony underscores the biggest challenge with a charge like seditious conspiracy: proving mens rea (intent). There was not some smoking gun document or testimony from Trump himself stating that he knew the claims of fraud were baseless but he was pushing them anyway. As unbelievable as the claims were, and with his advisors telling him they were false, if Trump truly believed the election was stolen, that would be a significant challenge for potential prosecutors. Were there to ever be a trial, the prosecution could put on evidence like the testimony from this hearing to convince a jury that Trump was willfully ignorant of the facts (which would satisfy the mens rea requirement), but that is obviously very risky. However, I would like to see more about the post-election fundraising in future hearings. I am not as familiar with the nuances of the law around wire fraud, but if the campaign was soliciting donations for legal expenses and instead funneling the money elsewhere, that would likely result in a lot of potential legal exposure for those involved.

Look man. I don't know you and you don't know me. But take a step back and look at what's actually being posted on this board. It's a swamp of garbage posts with little facts or logic. Just quick hits to get people angry and congratulate themselves on being smarter than everyone else. Any time an actual discussion accidentally happens, someone swoops in with the latest drivel from the Federalist or Red State. The quality of writing is poor, the news sources are horseshit, and very few people actually want to engage in discussion. It's just about pointing fingers and feeling superior. Whenever anything is introduced that may contradict the predominant worldview on PPP, it is immediately dismissed as not credible or the conversation is sidetracked into one of the standard whataboutisms. There is absolutely zero interest in hearing different perspectives. Sometimes it feels like this board is just all of the uncles that everybody avoids on Thanksgiving got together to start a club where they just rant about how evil everyone who disagrees with them is and how much better they are than everyone else.

It's really hard to understand how anyone could watch that presentation and still defend it as a peaceful protest or handwave it away because it was definitely all the fault of sleeper FBI agents. These people were traitors to the US and they attacked our government.

Secession would be a rude awakening for all of those red states that rely on the generosity of blue states and the federal government. In the “makers vs takers” conversation, states run by Republicans are generally takers.

To be fair, that’s why Reagan signed the gun control law that banned automatic weapons. Black people started getting guns to protect themselves and that was a bit “no-no” for the GOP.