Trump: ‘Leave Me the Rest’

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For raw emotional content, Tuesday’s hearing of the new House select committee to investigate the Jan. 6 uprising did not end. Four police officers who fought to stop armed hordes seeking to disrupt Congress recounted physical injury, racist abuse, and post-traumatic distress. Even for Americans who paid attention to the crisis, these stories added new texture and horror.

But the House Oversight Committee shed more light this week on how and why Jan. 6 happened, releasing handwritten notes by Richard Donoghue, a top Justice Department official in the past days of the Trump administration. . Today’s violence has been center stage, but these notes help put it in context: The angry majority is just part of President Donald Trump’s long -standing effort to overturn the election results in House of Representatives.

Trumps ’effort to call the election results in doubt began long before the votes were cast, but it accelerated immediately after the election. As I wrote on January 26, Trump’s coup attempt began not on January 6 but in the early hours of November 4, when Trump told the White House, This is a fraud to the American public. This is a disgrace to our country. We are preparing to win this election. He added: Honestly, we won this election. (He didn’t, and wasn’t honest.)

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In November and early December, the focus of the Trumps effort pressed on state officials in places like Arizona and Georgia who refused to certify the results in favor of Biden, and forced Attorney William Barr to doubt the results. But Barr refused, parting ways with Trump, and so did key Republicans including Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Arizona Governor Doug Ducey. Once Barr was pushed, The Washington Post reported this week, Trump began a daily campaign to pressure Acting Attorney Jeffrey Rosen to do what Barr didn’t like, trying to put a new fraud claims before the Department of Justice. Unbeknownst to Rosen, Trump is also organizing a plan to overthrow him.

What Trump expects to achieve from these efforts has always been somewhat vague. The Department of Justice does not certify elections, and more importantly can pursue fraud claims in court there are any credible ones, which are not. The new House Oversight Committee releases, first reported by The New York Times, connect the dots. Donoghue explained to Trump that the DOJ could not return the result, but the president was not upset.

Don’t expect to do that, just say the election was bad + leave the rest to me and R[epublican] Congressmen are how Donoghue recorded Trump’s response in handwriting.

All Trump wants is some semi-independent arbitrator to declare election fraud either to the governor of Arizona, the secretary of state of Georgia, or the U.S. Department of Justice. Obviously this is still clear ever, but the end of Trumps is not. After all, the leadership of Democrat Joe Bidens is broad enough that a single state refuses to prove or a single case of fraud cannot erase it. Trump, despite his vulnerability for conspiracy theories, understood that. But he didn’t need any of these officials to keep the results to themselves. He just needs enough ammunition, no matter how tenuous, that he can eliminate election certification in Congress.

If the election cannot be decided based on the results, then it will go to the House of Representatives. Although Democrats hold the majority there, the presidency is decided by state delegations, which are largely controlled by Republicans.

The Department of Justice refused to say the election was stolen, of course. Ahead of Jan. 6, Trump tried his last two options. First, he forced Vice President Mike Pence, both public and private, to refuse to confirm the results, but Pence decided he had no constitutional authority to do so. Trump also called a majority in Washington and asked that they protest. They did, but it didn’t work. Despite the attack on the Capitol, the election was certified, and Biden was inaugurated 14 days later.

Violence has become a stage recently. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is feared that Trump is contemplating a military coup, and has taken steps to ensure he cannot exploit the misuse of troops. Democrats have emphasized the violence because of the visceral reactions it has gone through because they hope to put pressure on Republicans who claim support for law enforcement by choosing them among the cops who have defended the Capitol against uprisings and rebels. Republicans in turn have tried to reduce violence and claim the rioter is actually full of pacific tourists.

What becomes clear is that the violence, though despicable, is only one part of a larger and more dangerous plot, not the culmination of it. Although Trump clearly had no problem with the chaos, there is no evidence that Trump thought of a violent coup, and as the attack on the Capitol took place, he watched, bemused, from the White House, neither call the attackers nor commit whatever to motivate them

Read: The resolution of the Trump era

Can Trump plan to throw the election in the House that worked, if only Barr or Raffensperger or Rosen or Donoghue or Pence wanted to come along? The answer is ultimately unknown, but depends in part on how you define success. Trump knows he has a small group of loyal members of Congress willing to rally on his side. He also knows that a larger GOP congressional group is not automatically Trumpist, but has proven repeatedly that there is no spin and can go along with him. If there was enough hypocrisy of corruption, and a loud and angry enough crowd at the National Mall, would there be enough Republicans to give in to the pressure? It seems unrealistic, though there is no way to know for sure.

Yet even if the House gambit fails, a public decision of a bad election of the Justice Department or of the vice president could be detrimental in its own right. Trump has a finger on the wrist of his supporters. (You people may not be following the internet the way I do, the overly online president told DOJ officials, and he was almost certainly right.) Despite the lack of evidence of fraud coming from the results in 2020, many Republicans will tell pollsters they have no confidence in the election system. If Trump succeeds some other authority in granting fraud claims to this imprimatur, the damage to faith in the election will be even deeper.

If the country is to consider what happened on Jan. 6, the focus needs to be less on tactical moves either by the police or the Oath Keepersaround the Capitol, and more on the strategic choices Trump is still making on Pennsylvania Avenue. throughout the postelection period

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