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Tonight Congress began its second prosecution of former President Donald Trump for his role in the events of the January 6, 2021, insurrection. The first occurred barely a month after the Capitol siege, when the Senate held an abbreviated impeachment trial that resulted in his acquittal. Last year, the Democrats leading the prosecution chose not to call witnesses. People want to get home for Valentines Day, Senator Chris Coons of Delaware reportedly told the impeachment managers, infuriating those who were hoping that the Senate would hold Trump accountable and bar him from ever running for public office again.

The House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack is calling witnesses this time aroundlots of them. In its first public hearing, televised in prime time by all major networks except Fox News, the panel aired clips of former Attorney General William Barr recounting how he told Trump that his claims that the 2020 election was stolen were bullshit. The committee interviewed Trumps eldest daughter, Ivanka, who said in a videotaped deposition that she accepted Barrs conclusion about her fathers bogus assertions.

The millions of viewers who likely tuned in to tonights opening salvo saw only a snippet of what the select committee has uncovered. (By design, this first of several hearings represented an opening statement, essentially teasing the revelations to come in future episodes, the next of which is on Monday morning.) The two-hour introduction was neither as dry as most congressional proceedings nor as slick as some had expected when news broke that the committee had hired a former ABC News executive to help plan its showcase.

David Frum: The one witness at the January 6 hearing who matters most

Yet at times, the event resembled a criminal trial as much as it did a standard House hearing. Instead of an endless parade of lawmaker statements, viewers had to endure only two: from Chairman Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who last year was removed as a member of the GOP leadership over her vote to impeach Trump. The committee also dispensed with opening statements from its two live witnesses, Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards and the documentary filmmaker Nick Quested.

Cheney, who holds a law degree from the University of Chicago, delivered a 30-minute speech previewing the committees case that Trump was at the center of the January 6 riot and the effort to overturn the election that led to it. President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack, she said. What followed was perhaps the most compelling evidence the committee presented tonightan 11-minute video compilation of the attack itself, showing the breach of the Capitol and featuring previously unseen police body-cam footage of harrowing hand-to-hand combat between officers and rioters. Weve lost the line! Weve lost the line! an officer is heard shouting at one point as a crowd surged toward the Capitol.

Again and again, the committee returned to Trump and his role in the insurrection. Among the arguments the hearings will advance is that Trump and his allies knew that he lost the election even as he tried to hold on to power. Committee members also spent much of the second half of tonights presentation trying to demonstrate that Trumps tweets and statements after the election were interpreted as motivationand even directionby the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, the two groups who came to Washington on January 6 prepared not merely for peaceful protest but for violence.

The goal of the hearings, aside from bolstering the historical record regarding January 6, is clearly to warn the public about the danger that Trump still presents, both as an individual who may again run for president in two years and as the leader of a movement that does not care much for democracy.

Grant Tudor: January 6 is dangerous shorthand

The structure of tonights openinggiving equal weight to the panels Democratic and Republican leadershad the effect of lending more bipartisanship to the committee than is probably merited. The House GOP officially boycotted the effort, forcing Democrats to name Cheney and Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois as members because they were the only Republicans willing to participate.

Trump is not a defendant, despite the committees best efforts to paint him as one. Its members cant hope to sanction him, only to sway public opinion and, perhaps, nudge the Justice Department to pursue the former president more aggressively than it already has. The panels chances to meaningfully reach the public, too, are limited, because the network with by far the most Trump-voting viewers, Fox News, has chosen not to air the hearings. Congress had its opportunity to hold Trump responsible more than a year ago, when the horror of January 6 was still fresh. The House impeached him and the Senate tried him. But senators chose Valentines Day over witnesses, a quick verdict over a deep and far-reaching investigation.

Now the public will finally get something close to a full accounting of January 6. But is it too late?

Republicans are poised to win back Congress this fall, and Trump, free to run once more, remains the likeliest presidential nominee in 2024. Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible, Cheney said at the conclusion of her speech, in an implicit acknowledgment of her lonely place in the party. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain. The committee is trying to reach people who havent made up their minds about Trump and the ongoing threat to democracyhowever many of them are left.

Link:
Trump Gets the January 6 Trial He Long Dodged - The Atlantic

Former president Donald Trump will testify under oath on 15 July in New York attorney general Letitia Jamess investigation into his business practices, according to a court filing released Wednesday.

His daughter Ivanka Trump and son Donald Trump Jr will also testify.

News of next months testimony is the latest development in the three-year investigation into the former presidents dealings after he failed in an attempt last month to stop her investigation and ended up paying a $110,000 fine.

James has said investigators have found significant evidence of wrongdoing in the investigation, which has homed in on whether the Trump Organization misstated the values of its real estate properties to obtain favorable loans and tax deductions.

The attorney general previously said her investigation discovered evidence suggesting that for more than a decade the companys financial statements relied on misleading asset valuations and other misrepresentations to secure economic benefits.

The Trumps are scheduled to testify beginning on 15 July, but they have until 13 June to ask New York states highest court, the court of appeals, to further delay any testimony. The testimony would be postponed if that court issued a stay.

Trump and his children had earlier argued that testifying in the civil investigation would violate their constitutional rights because their words could be used in a related criminal investigation led by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing. He has called the investigation a witch-hunt.

Reuters contributed to this report

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Donald Trump to testify in New York investigation into his business practices - The Guardian US

Yesterday evening, the leaders of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol opened their public hearingshearings that will show, in the words of vice chair Liz Cheney, that Donald Trump oversaw a sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.

Or, as committee chair Bennie Thompson put it, Donald Trump was at the center of this conspiracy.

Read: Trump gets the January 6 trial he long dodged

The violent assault on the Capitol was the culmination of that effort; Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack, Cheney said. And he reveled in what he had done. The more carnage, the better.

That Donald Trump acted the way he did was hardly a surprise; some of us had been warning about his borderless corruptions and disordered personality since before he became president. Its hard to imagine that theres any ethical line this broken, embittered, vindictive man wouldnt cross, including telling White House staff that Vice President Mike Pence deserved to be hanged by the violent mob that stormed the Capitol, because Pence wouldnt refuse to certify the election.

But the story of the Trump presidency isnt only about the corruptions and delusions of one man; its also about the party he represents. Trump recast the Republican Party, of which I was long a proud member, in his image. His imprint on the GOP is, in important respects, even greater than Ronald Reagans, despite Reagan being a successful two-term president.

Other presidents have been accused of wrongdoing, even high crimes and misdemeanors, Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times, but the case against Donald J. Trump mounted by the bipartisan House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol described not just a rogue president but a would-be autocrat willing to shred the Constitution to hang onto power at all costs.

It was bad enough that many Republicans were complicit in Trumps wrongdoings when he was president; that they continue to be complicit 17 months after Trump left the presidency is an even more damning indictment. Theyve continued to embrace Trump even though hes a loser.

Republicans stayed loyal to Richard Nixon far longer than they should have, but at least they abandoned him after the smoking gun tape was released that proved his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. What Trump has done is worse even than what Nixon did and yet Republicansdespite the case against Trump being far more comprehensive and detailed than we knew in the immediate aftermath of January 6continue to propagate his lies and either defend his seditious conduct or act as if it never happened. Its old news, were told. Nothing to see here. Time to move on.

Not so fast.

The sheer scale of Donald Trumps depravity is unmatched in the history of the American presidency, and the Republican Partythe self-described party of law and order and constitutional conservatives, of morality and traditional values, of patriotism and Lee Greenwood songsmade it possible. It gave Trump cover when he needed it. It attacked his critics when he demanded it. It embraced his nihilistic ethic. It amplified his lies. When House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthya man who for a few fleeting hours after the January 6 insurrection dared to speak critically of Donald Trumptraveled to Mar-a-Lago a few days later to kiss his ring, it was an act of self-abasement that was representative of his party, his morally desolate party.

David Frum: The one witness at the January 6 hearing who matters most

Make no mistake: Republicans are the co-creators of Trumps corrupt and unconstitutional enterprise. The great majority of them are still afraid to break fully with him. They consider those who have, like Liz Cheney, to be traitors to the party. They hate Cheney because she continues to hold up a mirror to them. They want to look away. She wont let them.

Perhaps the most withering sentences of Cheneys extraordinary presentation last night were these: Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.

Those in the Republican Party and on the American right who defended Trump and continue to do sowho went silent in the face of his transgressions, who rationalized their weakness, who went along for the ride for the sake of powermust know, deep in their hearts, that what she said is true. And it will always be true.

Their dishonor is indelible.

Read more from the original source:
The Moral Desolation of the GOP - The Atlantic

In Dallas he was prepared to decry, voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, which he feared could, handicap this countrys security.

He planned to say that We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.

It was to have been a bold statement and a sharp warning, one that might have altered to contours of our national response to todays violent, disassociated rhetoric had he lived to deliver it.

We often search leaders last words for deeper meaning, a message to the ages. Although Thomas Jeffersons last words were to his servants in the early-morning hours of July 4, 1826, and went unrecorded, and his last recorded words were to his physician, No doctor, nothing more, we instead focus on the fact that on the evening of July 3, Jefferson woke and asked with insistence, Is it the Fourth? It seems more appropriate that Jeffersons last words ask about the independence movement he helped set in motion exactly 50 years earlier. Of course, the reason we often take poetic license with last words is that people very rarely know what their last words will be, especially when death arrives unexpectedly.

Regardless of whether the speaker knew that death was near or not, we ascribe to those final statements a weight that we might not otherwise. Perhaps its because we never got to hear those words delivered in life that we hear them more clearly in death.

The final chapter of my new book, Undelivered, which covers roughly 20 historically significant undelivered speeches, looks at the speeches that Pope Pius XI, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, and John F. Kennedy were working on at the time they died.

Each has a powerful message to a future they wouldnt live to see.

As 1962 became 1963, President John F. Kennedy was enormously popular. Having successfully navigated the Cuban missile crisis, he began the year with a 70 percent approval rating. In March, he held a 67 percent to 27 percent polling advantage over the leading Republican challenger, Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Kennedy was also a cultural phenomenon; roughly half of all Americans had seen or heard a Kennedy imitator. But, as the year progressed, Kennedys focus on civil rights began to take a toll. His popularity dipped overall, and nose-dived in the South.

By the time Air Force One landed in Dallas, Texas had become an important political battleground. As The New York Times reported in early November, Even if Mr. Kennedy should write off most of the South, he is not writing off Texass 25 votes.

Looking at the documents that various administration and DNC officials submitted to speechwriter Ted Sorensen in order to prepare for the trip, one sees familiar building blocks to anyone trying to make a political argument today: a political update memo from the Democratic National Committee, an article on the economic situation in Texas from the Texas Business Review, and administration accomplishments documents for Texas that included statistics on public works spending, small business aid, and oil and gas leasing progress. Sorensen also assembled a collection of Texas humor Kennedy had requested.

In Dallas, Kennedy was prepared to speak to an audience comprised of several different groups. It included members of the Dallas Citizens Council and the Dallas Assembly, two groups of local business and nonprofit leaders, with another contingent from the Graduate Research Center of the Southwest. For speechwriters, audiences like this can pose a challenge: How do you address your remarks to all the groups while saying something meaningful to each?

Kennedy found his unifying theme in the link between leadership and learning. In words Kennedy was to deliver: leadership and learning are indispensable to each other. The advancement of learning depends on community leadership for financial and political support and the products of that learning, in turn, are essential to the leaderships hopes for continued progress and prosperity.

While the previous speeches Kennedy had given and those he planned to give on his Texas trip were generally workmanlike, including lists of accomplishments and solicitations of support, Kennedy was prepared to take a different approach with this speech and audience. For starters, it leaned heavily on national security.

To the extent Kennedys last, undelivered words are remembered, it is because of the powerful and well-publicized conclusion. Kennedy planned on ending his speech with these words:

We in this country, in this generation, areby destiny rather than choicethe watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of peace on earth, good will toward men. That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

Yes, Kennedy wanted America to serve as the watchman on the wall for world freedom. But a closer reading of the speech and the circumstances in which it was drafted shows that Kennedy recognized and wanted to make clear that the watchman on the wall cant just look outward to see threats to freedom he must also look inside the walls as well.

Although the speech is remembered as one devoted to national security, nearly half is devoted to a different concern: what Sorensen described as the fires of rage that burned beneath the surface of Americas peace and prosperity.

These fires of rage revealed themselves in an increasingly vocal right-wing effort to discredit and demonize Kennedy. One of the leaders of this effort was Edwin Walker, a former World War II general who helped foment riots at the University of Mississippi when the school attempted to integrate by admitting James Meredith in 1962.

Walker also ran as a fringe candidate for governor of Texas. Using language similar to the attacks President Donald Trump and his supporters would wage on his political opponents a half century later, Walker declared that civil rights demonstrations in Washington and Texas were pro-Kennedy, pro-Communist and pro-Socialist.

As we have seen all too often recently, violent words are often a precursor and provide a permission structure for violent actions.

In fact, a month earlier in Dallas, remarks by Adlai Stevenson were disrupted by Walker supporters who held American flags upside down (a tactic Walker encouraged), unfurled a banner that replaced the words Welcome Adlai with UN RED FRONT, and tried to drown out Stevensons words with noisemakers.

The scene is recounted in masterful and harrowing detail in the book Dallas 1963 by Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis.

As one particularly combative heckler was escorted out, Stevenson called after him: For my part, I believe in the forgiveness of sin and the redemption of ignorance.

It was an unintentional precursor to Kennedys language about the linkage between leadership and learning.

After the remarks, Stevenson was spit on and one protestor, Cora Lacy Frederickson, began hitting Stevenson with large sign. It read: ADLAI, WHO ELECTED YOU?

In advance of Kennedys arrival, Walker and his followers felt further emboldened. They distributed leaflets accusing Kennedy of treason, of being lax on communism, and of appointing anti-Christians to Federal office.

Indeed, this is why Kennedy opened his address with a statement about the importance of learning, hoping to remind people to tether attitudes and opinions to facts.

Americas leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

If Kennedy wanted to talk about the important linkage between leadership and learning, he also wanted to remind people how much leadership can be sacrificed when we turn away from learning and embrace ignorance.

And so Kennedy sought to address this dangerous, angry, violence-inducing disassociation from reality in his address. He distinguished this kind of attitude from the constant complainers, the dissident voices who will always be expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility.

Those voices of constant complaint, Kennedy was to say, are inevitable. While he accepted the inevitability of dissident voices, he was more concerned about those who knowingly promote and spread lies.

But today other voices are heard in the land voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality, wholly unsuited to the sixties, doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness. At a time when the national debt is steadily being reduced in terms of its burden on our economy, they see that debt as the greatest single threat to our security. At a time when we are steadily reducing the number of Federal employees serving every thousand citizens, they fear those supposed hordes of civil servants far more than the actual hordes of opposing armies.

Update hordes of immigrants for hordes of civil servants (the point about the debt, ironically, remains as accurate and relevant now as it did then), and this warning resonates clearly today.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this countrys security.

Kennedys hope? We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will talk sense to the American people. But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense.

Leaders play a role in increasing our awareness of threats and conditioning our responses to them.

Would Americans have sat up and paid attention if their president had hectored them to stop listening to nonsense?

If Kennedy had lived and secured a second term, would he have made combatting domestic extremism a priority articulating the threat from within as clearly as clearly as he articulated the threat from Russia in his first campaign?

Of course, we cannot know.

But what we do know is that Kennedy wanted an America with fewer people listening to and falling prey to nonsense. In his unspoken last speech, Kennedy left us with a warning against the type of angry, disassociated rhetoric that is causing such damage to, and within, democratic governments around the world today.

Go here to see the original:
The Warning About Trump That JFK Never Got to Deliver - POLITICO

Strong language and graphic video evidence was used in the first public hearing of the January 6 Committee on Capitol Hill to illustrate how former President Donald Trump allegedly orchestrated the attempted coup.

Mayor Lori Lightfoot officially kicked off her re-election campaign saying that violence is her number one issue. Challengers are slamming her brash style and Chicagos persistent and violent crime during her tenure.

Meanwhile, gun reforms pass in the House of Representatives, which may help stanch the flow of semi-automatic weapons. New polling shows Darren Bailey ahead of Richard Irvin in the GOP gubernatorial primary as the mayor of Aurora flip-flops on the Aurora Pride Parade permit.

Former Mayor Richard Daley has been hospitalized but is reportedly alert. And, the judge in Ald. Ed Burkes corruption case rules that undercover recordings will be admitted as evidence as the case drags on into its third year.

Guests

Bill Cameron,890 WLS News Chicago| @BillJCameron

Laura Washington, Chicago Tribune | ABC 7 Chicago | @MediaDervish @ABC7Chicago

Lynn Sweet, Chicago Sun-Times| @SunTimes @LynnSweet

Shia Kapos, Politico| @Politico @ShiaKapos

Did you miss us? Check out more episodes of The Week in Review.

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The Week in Review: Donald Trump at Center of January 6 Committee Hearing - WTTW News