“Every conceivable crime” of Trump during the storming of the Capitol

On the morning of January 6, 2021, loyalist Pat Cipollone told Cassidy Hutchinson, “Please make sure we don’t go to the Capitol, Cassidy. Keep in touch with me. If we fail to prevent it, we will be charged with every conceivable crime.” Hutchinson recalled the warning last week in a sworn statement before the United States Congressional committee, which for a month has been returning again and again to the longest day of American democracy, that black day in which a mob of supporters of Donald Trump staged an insurrection and stormed the Capitol. At the end of the testimony of the young assistant to the former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the chairman of the committee, the Democrat from Mississippi Bennie Thompson, trusted that his courage would catch on in other collaborators close to the tycoon. “If you discover a courage that you had hidden somewhere inside, I want to tell you that our doors remain open,” he launched. This Friday, Cipollone, reluctant to speak until now, singing for seven hours (behind closed doors) in a recorded statement.

The confessions were “frank” and “in line with what was told by other witnesses,” Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (California) revealed to CNN that day. So the statement will surely be among the highlights of the two sessions that the commission has announced for next week. The first, on Tuesday morning, will focus on the links between false Trump election-stealing theories and far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Its members met in Washington that day and, instigated by Trump during a rally, took the reins of an assault that the commission wants to prove was planned. They sought to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory, a democratic process never interrupted before.

In a surprising plot twist, Oath Keepers frontman Stewart Rhodes announced Friday through his attorney his desire to testify in Congress, provided he is allowed to do so live. Rhodes is in prison, awaiting a seditious conspiracy trial in which he could get up to 20 years. That same day it was learned that one of his cronies went to Washington with explosives and that he was carrying a list of targets with the names of election officials from Georgia, whom Trump had singled out.

In previous weeks, the committee’s nine members — seven Democrats and two Republicans — advanced that Thursday’s session would focus on the 187 minutes it took for Trump to tell protesters to go home. Hutchinson revealed in the sixth hearing that the Republican president knew that many were armed, that he still encouraged them to go to the Capitol to convince his vice president, Mike Pence, not to concede victory, and that he himself, who sympathized with the shouts of “Hang Mike Pence”, wanted to accompany them. (And hence Cipollone’s concern about being tainted by “every crime imaginable.”)

It is not yet clear if these two hearings will be the last (the conclusions have been announced for August or September), but it is expected that they will close a cycle in the same way that they opened it: in prime time. For months the commission has prepared a show that mixes live witnesses (carefully chosen among Republican sympathizers, to give an idea of ​​impartiality) with videos of statements gleaned between hours and hours of recording. The weight of each session is carried by a different interrogator and always has the presentations of the stars of the Show: The president and vice president, Republican Liz Cheney (Wyoming), whose bet has been read as her particular all or nothing against Trumpism.

Several members of the team that organizes the sessions have attributed these weeks in conversations with this newspaper to Cheney decisions such as the duration of each shot being shorter than what parliamentary standards dictate or that they be monographic. After the inaugural, something like the pilot episode of the series, there have been sessions focused on the chaotic election night of November 2020 in the White House, on the harassment of Pence, on the pressure and threats on officials from places like Arizona or Georgia to subvert the results, or in the White House’s attempts to manipulate the Department of Justice. The last one, Hutchinson’s, was pulled out of his sleeve without warning.

The intention behind this design is to share, chewed and processed with a television pulse, the results of months of research. Washington’s media and political ecosystem is following them passionately. The question is whether the American people are taking notice. And the answer, despite the explosive revelations, is that not as much as one might expect: According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, “about 6 in 10 Americans say they are following the news about the January 6 committee, but only one a third is awaiting their conclusions, and an even smaller percentage is watching the hearings on television.”

The commission would settle, however, for only one of its viewers to take good account of its work: Attorney General Merrick Garland, in whose hand it is to impeach Trump. It will not be easy. Such a decision could have far-reaching legal and political consequences, beginning with the discussion of whether Garland would be incurring a conflict of interest by going after an opponent of his boss, President Biden: for the moment, his main adversary for the 2024 election is Trump. A movement in this direction could also blow up the precarious balance of a society split in two and facing all kinds of cultural and media wars. It could also establish the dangerous habit that an Administration undertakes against its predecessor. And then there is the fact that the evidence so far presented (despite forming a shocking mountain of sensational revelations) may not be enough to hold him guilty at trial.

Since they began a month ago, the shadow of comparison to the Watergate hearings, held another summer 49 years ago, has been a constant. Even if it is to certify that this time things are different: from that investigation, which kept an electorate glued to their television sets that had just granted Richard Nixon one of the most overwhelming victories in the history of American democracy, his resignation as president. Today’s much more polarized society is less inclined to trust a commission, which, according to an ABC/Ypsos poll, 60% consider to be partisan. In other words, Nixon resigned when he lost the support of his own, and it does not seem that the supporters of Trump, who has already overcome a impeachment Due to these facts, an impeachment process in which Cipollone, by the way, participated in his defense, they plan to cease to be so, no matter how dramatic revelations arise. Not to mention that the average American, gripped by inflation and runaway gas prices, feels other urgencies.

To continue with the Watergate parallel, the commission still hasn’t found his “smoking gun,” and they haven’t yet found his John Dean, whose testimony changed everything then. Perhaps Cipollone, the man who was always there in the weeks between the election and the attack on Capitol Hill, is the John Dean they’re looking for.

Until the content of his revelations is known, the only thing certain is that he will have to face the consequences of his decision to testify. As Nixon tried to put pressure on witnesses to his criminal conduct, Trump aides and supporters are threatening Republicans collaborating with the January 6 commission. Hutchinson revealed a message received shortly before appearing whose language was more typical of the mafia than the environment of a former president. And this week, the other Republican representative on the committee, Adam Kinzinger (Illinois), shared on his Twitter account the kind of messages he receives daily on the answering machine in his Capitol office: a string of explicit (and quite imaginative) threats. addressed to him and his family, uttered by madmen who remind him over and over again that they know “where they live”.

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