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Dust off the Cobwebs: Jan 6 Hearing Is This Thursday at 1 pm Eastern

Jan 6: Hearings

You are here: Home / Archives for Jan 6: Hearings

Cheney Turns Over a Teapot

by Betty Cracker|  November 29, 202310:14 am| 150 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Hearings, Jan 6: Insurrection, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality

Liz Cheney, avenging angel of the deposed neo-con wing of the Republican Party, has a book coming out soon. CNN got its mitts on a pre-publication copy. From the excerpts I read, it seems that Cheney, unlike certain political reporters, didn’t hold back material details to drive book sales. But the book contains color that may interest DC soap opera addicts.

Cheney describes Kevin McCarthy as a craven liar, which isn’t news to anyone, Republican or Democrat. Contempt for McCarthy (along with loathing for Vivek Ramaswamy) are among the few bipartisan political beliefs Americans still share. But Cheney adds details on the motives behind McCarthy’s post-J6 maneuvers to effect a Trump rapprochement.

I figured McCarthy walked back his initial assertion that Trump bore responsibility for the mob attack on the Capitol after seeing polls indicating Trump was still popular in his district. Turns out the danger McCarthy perceived was related but much graver than that: Cheney says McCarthy feared alienating Trump would affect McCarthy’s “ability to fundraise,” which prompted the about-face on Trump.

Cheney, who was still in House leadership at the time, says when she first saw the photo of McCarthy shaking hands with Trump in Florida three weeks after the coup attempt, she thought it was photoshopped. When she found out it was real, Cheney demanded answers.

“Mar-a-Lago? What the hell, Kevin?” Cheney asked.

“They’re really worried,” McCarthy said. “Trump’s not eating, so they asked me to come see him.”

“What? You went to Mar-a-Lago because Trump’s not eating?” Cheney responded.

“Yeah, he’s really depressed,” McCarthy said.

The not eating thing has to be a falsehood. I mean, maybe for five hours he didn’t eat, but for three weeks? McCarthy lies a lot, but the Trump muumuu-suits don’t. (Still, I do hope he was despondent, if only temporarily. Despite the pending legal matters, I suspect a psychological toll is the only measure of justice we’ll ever get out of the traitorous orange fart cloud, so every bit of distress should be relished.)

Cheney describes the House Repubs’ descent into cowardice and madness, which we all saw in real time. She says one colleague praised her courage for standing up to Trump but declined to do so himself out of fear for his family’s safety. (Take note, New York appeals court!) She describes a caucus session after she voted to impeach where she was hectored by a colleague in dumb sexist terms:

She refused to back down, and what followed was a four-hour meeting where colleagues attacked her for standing up to Trump. In one memorable exchange, Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania said to her, “It’s like you’re playing in the biggest game of your life and you look up and see your girlfriend sitting on the opponent’s side!”

The remark provoked a chorus of female members who yelled back, “She’s not your girlfriend!”

Good God. But Cheney didn’t fit in anywhere anymore. She writes about working with Democrats on the January 6 inquiry, saying it was like being “a visitor from another planet.” Pelosi understood the value of Cheney’s participation and brushed off staffers’ objections:

Cheney writes that Pelosi’s team “pulled together a list of the 10 worst things I had ever said about her. Speaker Pelosi took one look at the list, handed it back to her staffer, and asked: ‘Why are you wasting my time with things that don’t matter?’”

It was an unexpected alliance, but Cheney says Pelosi always backed her up, and in turn, she was immediately impressed by Pelosi’s leadership.

“We may have disagreed on pretty much everything else, but Nancy Pelosi and I saw eye to eye on the one thing that mattered more than any other: the defense of our Constitution and the preservation of our republic.”

I don’t know if Pelosi holds grudges or settles scores, but if she does, she waits until the object of her ire is no longer useful to Democrats. Smart lady!

According to CNN, Cheney ends the book with a plea:

“Every one of us – Republican, Democrat, Independent – must work and vote together to ensure that Donald Trump and those who have appeased, enabled, and collaborated with him are defeated.”

Cheney concludes: “This is the cause of our time.”

Well, Cheney is wrong about almost everything, but she’s not wrong about that.

Open thread!

Cheney Turns Over a TeapotPost + Comments (150)

Friday Night Open Thread: We’re Good, They’re… Fekked Up

by Anne Laurie|  March 3, 20239:52 pm| 131 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Jan 6: Hearings, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republican Stupidity, Republican Venality, Republicans in Disarray!

smart kid pic.twitter.com/zF0xCz3dMS

— world famous art thief (@CalmSporting) March 3, 2023

Elsewhere…

Choice quote by Republican familiar with the proceedings involving Jim Jordan’s ‘whistleblowers’:

What Jordan has produced is “very much amateur hour.” Airing this “stuff on live television would make us look like morons.”
https://t.co/iFjMFgSr59

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) March 3, 2023

Seems like an accurate appraisal:

In early February, Republicans brought an FBI veteran to Capitol Hill whom they hoped would expose a “deep state conspiracy” among Democrats and their accomplices in the intelligence community. The GOP witness was part of a network of “whistleblowers” — funneled to congressional Republicans’ new Weaponization of Government panel by allies of Donald Trump — to reveal covert attacks on the former president and broad, anti-conservative discrimination.

But before the interview was over, it was the GOP witness who was failing to answer difficult questions — and Democratic committee staff doing the asking…

According to portions of transcripts reviewed by Rolling Stone and sources familiar with the exchange, Hill repeatedly declined to respond to the questions and cited his First Amendment rights. (He’d later go on a conservative talk show to accuse Democrats of trying to paint him as a “right-wing nut job” because they couldn’t handle his message.) As the exchange went on, Hill’s attorney, Jason Foster, begged the Democratic counsel to stop asking about his client’s tweets.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the chair of the new House Judiciary’s “weaponization” subcommittee, opened its first hearing vowing that he’d heard from “dozens and dozens” of whistleblowers about “the political nature at the Justice Department.” Indeed, powerful players from Trump’s orbit have invested in recruiting intelligence community veterans, hoping to produce bombshell revelations and must-see TV to rival the results of the Jan. 6 committee.

But so far, Republicans have brought only three of those whistleblowers to Capitol Hill for questioning, and have not scheduled any additional interviews after completing the most recent in mid-February. In the interviews conducted to date, witnesses have offered contradictory responses, maintained fringe and violent online presences that undermine their credibility, and failed to demonstrate first-hand knowledge of alleged FBI wrongdoing.

The results have left Democrats gleeful and even some Republicans deeply unimpressed. A “dumpster fire,” is how one Democrat with knowledge of the at-times combative interactions terms the proceedings. “Clearly there is room to grow and improve before [more] public hearings,” a Republican familiar with the process tells Rolling Stone. But the work so far, the Republican says, has been “very much amateur hour,” adding that airing this “stuff on live television would make us look like morons.” (Sources spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitive matters.)…

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But if the whistleblowers aren’t able to produce what Jordan has promised, it will be a serious blow to Republicans’ plan to use control of the House to refocus the public away from Trump’s proximity to an insurrection and onto an alleged anti-conservative conspiracy.

The whistleblower pipeline comes from a collaboration between Jordan, other MAGA lawmakers, and top officials in Trump’s orbit. Whistleblowers have received payments and legal counsel through this loose network; one whistleblower, Stephen Friend — a former FBI agent who brought concerns about the agency’s questioning of Jan. 6 protesters to Republicans — even received a job…

After Jordan and his cohorts concluded their first “Weaponization” hearing last month, several figures in the right-wing media elite — who are staunchly loyal to Trump and the GOP and already primed to just run with the party’s claims and supposed bombshells — reacted with head scratches. “I’m sick of these hearings,” Jesse Watters, a Fox News host and a buddy of Trump’s, complained on-air after the inaugural House Weaponization of the Federal Government subcommittee hearing. “Make me feel better, guys. Tell me this is going somewhere. Can I throw someone in prison? Can someone go to jail? Can someone get fined?”….

Well, maybe! But Jesse won’t be happy when it turns out to be the Repubs who get dinged, will he?

Just how weak is Jim Jordan's weaponization lineup of "whistleblowers"?

This weak:

"We urge Chairman Jordan to schedule the public testimony of these individuals without delay."

From Democratic Staff Report's Forward by the committee and subcommittee's ranking members.👇 pic.twitter.com/nEG0ntvdZz

— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw) March 3, 2023

Maybe it’s time Dems get serious about ripping Grassley’s
face off for having Barbara Ledeen, who spent 2016 plotting with Mike Flynn to try and buy non-existent Hillary Clinton emails from Russian criminals, on his staff. This is a guy who’s facilitated bad shit. https://t.co/zWCvmFm8eu

— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) March 3, 2023

Friday Night Open Thread: We’re Good, They’re… Fekked UpPost + Comments (131)

Open Thread: Tidbits from New Evidence Released by the Jan 6 Committee

by WaterGirl|  January 2, 202311:51 am| 280 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Hearings, Jan 6: Insurrection, Open Threads, Politics

Politico:

The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences.

The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the well-coordinated effort by some Trump allies to help Trump seize a second term he didn’t win. Much of the evidence has never been seen before and, in some cases, adds extraordinary new elements to the case the select committee presented in public — from voluminous phone records to contemporaneous text messages and emails.

Fun Facts:

Hope Hicks was “so mad and upset” that “we all look like domestic terrorists now.”  (Apparently it was only a problem because it made her look bad?)

Hope Hicks thought Trump’s attacks on Mike Pence on Jan 6 were a bridge too far:  “WTF is wrong with him?”  (Okay, so she draws the line at murder.  Everyone has to have standards!)

The Trump administration considered court-martialing retirees who criticized Trump.

Michael Flynn’s idea/plan to use “martial law” to seize voting machines or involve the military in Donald Trump’s effort to remain in power was apparently a bridge too far for his brother who SAYS he doesn’t agree with those views. (Not sure I’m convinced.)

Mike Milley classified a boatload of Jan 6 documents “at a pretty high level” to preserve them for likely future investigations.

Read the article, it’s not very long!  h/t to the person who linked to this in an earlier thread.  Maybe Geminid?

Open thread.

Open Thread: Tidbits from New Evidence Released by the Jan 6 CommitteePost + Comments (280)

Open Thread: The Final Report of the Jan6 Select Committee

by Anne Laurie|  December 28, 20226:18 pm| 118 Comments

This post is in: Excellent Links, Jan 6: Hearings, Proud to Be A Democrat

January 6 Report Is Real, And It's Spectacular by @5DollarFeminist https://t.co/OpcEGD4DBb

— Wonkette (@Wonkette) December 26, 2022


Best short analysis I’ve run across, thank you Liz Dye:

Who wants to read the entire 845-page January 6 Select Committee Final Report?

Oh, nobody?

Fine, then. We’ll do it for you….

‘Frankly We DID Win This Election.’
Our story picks up on on election night at the White House when a drunk Giuliani told Trump to go out and declare victory, even after Fox News called Arizona for Joe Biden. Everyone else urged caution, but Trump waddled out before the cameras and started yelling about fraud — even before his team had decided exactly which Black civil servants to pin a target on…

Frankly, he did not win this election. In fact, he lost the popular vote by 4.5 percent, although it was alarmingly close in some of the swing states. But it was frankly unsurprising that Trump falsely declared victory on election night with tens of millions of ballots uncounted. Indeed, his allies telegraphed that punch with total clarity.

Thanks to Mother Jones, we’ve all heard the tape of Steve Bannon on Halloween bragging that the president was “just gonna say he’s a winner” and “take advantage” of the late counting of absentee and mail-in ballots, which overwhelmingly favored Biden…

Team Comparatively Normal vs. Team Fuckbonkers
After the election, the campaign descended into two factions. Stepien described himself and attorneys Justin Clark, Alex Cannon, and Matthew Morgan as leading up “Team Normal,” which is only accurate by comparison to the team of crackpot loons led by Rudy Giuliani. It’s easy to call yourself “normal” relative to a pile of broken toys that includes Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, John Eastman, Jenna Ellis, Christina Bobb, and Jeff Clark, all of them twitching and making weird noises about Italian space lasers and Chinese Bluetooth thermostats. A “normal” person wouldn’t have signed on to represent a racist circus clown and enthusiastically applauded for months as he told egregious lies, heedlessly destroying civic unity and Americans’ faith in the electoral process in service of his own selfish goals.

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But okay, according to their own post facto, entirely self-serving testimony, “Team Comparatively Normal” told Trump that he’d lost on November 7 after all the networks called the election for Biden, describing the prospects of a victory as “5, maybe 10 percent … very, very, very bleak.” In reality, there was a zero percent chance. But having given their assessment, TCN courageously … ceded the field to Rudy and the weirdos…

The Road To The Capitol
The committee goes to great lengths to debunk Trump’s lies about election fraud. They point to hand recounts in Michigan and Georgia, confirming the original tallies, as well as Trump’s repeated references to “suitcases” of fraudulent ballots, even after being told by his own Justice Department that this was totally false. We don’t have to spend a lot of time on that here, because presumably you’re not a mouth-breathing MAGAt, brain poisoned by OAN. But Trump attesting in a legal filing to numbers about supposed fraud in Georgia, when he knew those numbers were false, has already been described by a federal judge as “likely” criminal, and may form the basis of a future prosecution.

But just as importantly, Trump fed these lies to his credulous supporters, who believed them because they implicitly trusted that the leader of our country would not rely on totally made up numbers. And he continued to repeat those lies to the mob on January 6…

Sure, we all giggled at the cosplay electors. We laughed at the Kraken lawsuits. Rudy leaking hair dye at the RNC and convening a press conference in the parking lot of a landscaper across from the porno store was legitimately hilarious. And yet there is a direct through line from these ridiculous people and their obvious bullshit to the mob that descended on the Capitol on January 6.

TL, DR, lock them up. Or, if we can’t do that, figure out how to fix this country so this shit never happens again. Because next time, our adversaries probably won’t be this bloody stupid.

This behind-the-scenes account of how the Jan. 6 committee did its work is really good. [Gift link, should work for all.]

Two comments:

1.) Pelosi!
2.) Reading this, you realize the chances of anything like it being allowed to happen again are near zero. https://t.co/6vS1XkVj7u

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 23, 2022

… The most consequential congressional committee in generations was immersed in high drama from beginning to end. It originated six months after a domestic siege of the Capitol. It devoted a year to seeking evidence from sources who were often reluctant or even hostile. It then presented that evidence in the form of captivating televised hearings that were watched by more than 10 million Americans at a time, leading up to the November 2022 midterms in which a clear majority cast their ballots against election denialism. And then the committee concluded its work by making history with its criminal referrals of a former president to the Department of Justice.

But the inner workings of the Jan. 6 committee — members of Congress, lawyers, video producers and assorted staff members totaling about 80 people tasked with investigating a violent attack on American democracy and a sitting president’s role in that attack — have been almost completely shrouded from public view. Through extensive interviews with all nine of the committee’s members and numerous senior staff members and key witnesses, we have been able to reconstruct a previously unreported account of the committee’s fevered, fraught and often chaotic race to a finish line that has always been understood to be Jan. 3, 2023, when the new Congress is sworn in and a new Republican majority in the House would immediately dissolve the committee. Those same efforts took place at a time when the Republican Party was resolutely united behind the committee’s principal target, Trump, with politicians and voters alike joining the former president in lustily condemning the inquiry at every opportunity…

[The NYTimes *really* wants to fluff Liz Cheney’s reputation, no surprise.]

With its expiration date of Jan. 3 looming, the committee spent its final months in a frenzy of activity occasionally marred by bitter contentiousness. Cheney, unsurprisingly, was at the center of the conflicts. One point of disagreement was over her insistence that the committee make criminal referrals of Trump; John Eastman, the lawyer who advised Trump that Pence could overturn the election; and others to the Justice Department, which initially struck Lofgren as an empty symbolic gesture, until Thompson stepped in and helped form a consensus around Cheney’s position.

Far more controversial internally was Cheney’s adamant position that the committee’s final report focus primarily on Trump’s misconduct, while marginalizing the roles of violent domestic actors, their financial organizers and their sympathizers in law enforcement. Informed of this decision in early November, current and former staff members anonymously vented their outrage to news outlets. Some members aligned themselves with the dismayed staff, while other members agreed with Cheney that some of the chapters drafted by different aides did not measure up to the committee’s standards. Still, it seemed excessive to some on the committee when Cheney’s spokesperson claimed to The Washington Post on Nov. 23 that some of the staff members submitting draft material for the report were promoting a viewpoint “that suggests Republicans are inherently racist.”…

In this story of how the Jan. 6 hearings got made, one high point is the appearance of David Brooks. https://t.co/6vS1XkVj7u pic.twitter.com/yI2OwBbpKA

— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) December 23, 2022

TL;DR…

This thread presents a brief summary of the substantive findings of the Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. My own interpretations of the report will follow later. 0/

— Timothy Snyder (@TimothyDSnyder) December 26, 2022

@sryslysmibuch Bonjour, please find the unroll here: https://t.co/UgMmgBiIuW Enjoy :) ??

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) December 26, 2022

Open Thread: The Final Report of the Jan6 Select CommitteePost + Comments (118)

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Everything All At Once

by Anne Laurie|  December 21, 20225:51 am| 223 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Hearings, Open Threads, President Biden, Proud to Be A Democrat, War in Ukraine

Last night at the White House, a little girl interrupted the closing music for the Biden's Hanukkah party speech to ask him "How do I become president?" He took back the mic and answered: "Know who you want to help, and know what you'd rather lose the election than do." pic.twitter.com/70jqn9GL7E

— Yair Rosenberg (@Yair_Rosenberg) December 20, 2022

Biden and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy will hold a joint press conference in the East Room at 4:30p.

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) December 21, 2022

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News: Zelensky’s joint address to Congress is currently scheduled for 730pm tomorrow night, according to two sources familiar with the plan

Timing is subject to change, but this is the current plan, and he will go to the Capitol after his meeting/ press conference with Biden https://t.co/XH1ryzgaN6

— Alayna Treene (@alaynatreene) December 21, 2022

.@SpeakerPelosi’s official letter to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine inviting him to address a Joint Meeting of Congress on Dec 21

“America and the world are in awe of the heroism of the Ukrainian people.” pic.twitter.com/5ndb34HtVT

— Kadia Goba (@kadiagoba) December 21, 2022

NEW: $1.7 trillion spending bill released overnight to avert govt shutdown notes the crush of Jan 6 prosecutions

Legislation "provides increases for heightened prosecution workload arising from the US Capitol attack"

It *is* a crushing caseload. 930+ cases, 100s more expected

— Scott MacFarlane (@MacFarlaneNews) December 20, 2022

Oh look what I found in my pack of Trump trading cards. pic.twitter.com/Z6lVc0iW5D

— Robert Young Pelton (@RYP__) December 15, 2022

Senate Republican indirectly calls House Republicans too irresponsible to govern https://t.co/KpNmJgBee2

— Laura Rozen (@lrozen) December 21, 2022

This story deserves its own post, but there’s so much news right now…

Incisive, scoopy report on what really happened in 2022: abortion (+ Trumpism) drove GOP-voting women to Ds. And mostly male-run R campaigns underestimated the threat…

“an intangible that’s hard to explain to men.”

via @ec_schneider @hollyotterbein https://t.co/jjwJQS8ZLB

— Eli Stokols (@EliStokols) December 19, 2022

Remember a lot of liberal male pundits waxing about how women wouldn’t care by the time the election rolled around. God to live in a world where an unwanted pregnancy can’t derail your entire life, put you in debt, take away your future, and/or end up costing you your life.

— KatSam (@katSam93) December 20, 2022

This shows that Americans of all faiths, as well as those w no religious affiliation, support abortion rights…except white evangelical Protestants, who are radical extremists. Take them out of the mix & abortion wouldn’t be a contested matter https://t.co/xIVvPuYfvr

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 20, 2022

Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Everything All At OncePost + Comments (223)

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Shut Up, Pence

by Anne Laurie|  December 20, 20228:05 pm| 100 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Hearings, Open Threads, Republican Stupidity, Republicans in Disarray!, Trump Crime Cartel

I’ll think of that menorah when I watch you celebrate the 13 days of Christmas. https://t.co/geNBv0EAu7

— Panda Bernstein (@J4Years) December 20, 2022

(Spoiler: Count the candles.)

 
Mr. Pierce, at Esquire — “All Mike Pence Wants for Christmas Is No Charges Against His Old Boss”:

… The primary reason Pence will not be president is that nobody wants to vote for him. There are a number of reasons for this. The dedicated Trumpists won’t vote for him because he refused to commit sedition on January 6, 2021. Other people will not vote for him because he accepted the vice presidency from a president* who defiled the office. Other people will not vote for him because they live in Indiana, and they remember how much they didn’t like Pence as their governor. Still more people will not vote for him because he is a god-struck empty suit, who if he ever had an original idea, it died of loneliness and despair.

For example, here he is on Fox News, arguing against any criminal action aimed at his former boss because…Christmas.

“I hope the Justice Department understands the magnitude of the very idea of indicting a former president of the United States. I think that would be terribly divisive in the country at a time when the American people want to see us heal. At this time of year, we’re all thinking about the most important things in our lives: our faith, our family. And my hope is, the Justice Department think very carefully before proceeding.” …

Luria: I'm actually kind of tired of Mike pence trying to have it both ways. He really takes the limelight and likes to be portrayed as a hero because he did his job and followed the law. But at the same time, he goes back and tries to attack a committee pic.twitter.com/8ZwKDveYsd

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 19, 2022

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“If you need a friend in Washington,” the longtime friend and former senior adviser Pence told me, “don’t get yourself a dog. Get yourself a Mike Pence.” https://t.co/xqlBgGbFml

— Adam Wren (@adamwren) December 19, 2022

The late, great blogger Doghouse Riley warned us about Pence: His greatest talent is loyalty, which is a bit of a handicap for someone so ambitious:

… The core of Pence’s identity has always been loyalty — to his friends, his wife, his faith, his party, his country. Then came the day he had to choose between his boss — the leader of his party — and the Constitution. And he chose the latter. Suddenly, Pence found himself in unfamiliar territory — politically isolated. Reviled by former President Donald Trump’s supporters who saw him as a coward but not completely embraced by Trump’s critics who saw him as permanently tainted for having stood by the former president, he had no natural constituency upon which to build the last act of his political project. Now, as Pence peddles a new memoir and ponders his own run for president, he’s struggling to demonstrate where his loyalties really lie — to the former president whose White House record he proudly touts as a shared legacy, or to a wing of the party that is debating whether to unshackle itself from a conspiracy-laden cult of personality. At a moment when Pence most needs to clearly identify himself to a party that is beginning to audition alternatives to its divisive de facto leader, Pence seems stuck in some muddled attempt to be multiple things simultaneously. And nothing expresses that strained compromise quite like his tortured rationale about whom to support on the campaign trail this fall.

I asked one of his longest-serving advisers what to make of the disconnect between Pence’s frustration over Jan. 6 and his decision to campaign for election deniers. The aide pointed out that Pence had not campaigned for Kari Lake in her bid for governor in Arizona, “I think he’s drawing a line in some respects,” the aide said. But no one, not his aides and not Pence, can explain what or where the line is that distinguishes Lake and Masters — both of whom were endorsed by Trump and both of whom have propagated conspiracy theories about Jan. 6.

A week after the midterms, after Masters and Lake had lost and the Republicans’ red wave had collapsed, I spoke with Pence by phone as he sat in the Simon & Schuster offices during a New York City publicity swing for his new book, So Help Me God. I asked him directly about this seeming contradiction, to help me understand the line he was drawing but also to define the kind of candidate Pence himself wants to be and the kind of party he aspires to lead. He answered with another contradiction. “Those that sought to relitigate the past did not fare as well,” he answered. But he also said he was “pleased” to campaign with those candidates.

“Didn’t mean I agreed on everything they ever said, or every position they ever took,” he told me. “I just was convinced that at a time of great challenges for America, at home and abroad, that we needed new leadership. … I’ve often said I’m a Christian, a conservative and a Republican in that order. But I’m a proud Republican, and I was proud to campaign with those Republicans across the country.”…

Those who know Pence best say he is wrestling with how to recalibrate himself to a Republican base that hasn’t yet forgiven him for refusing Trump’s pressure to overturn the election results — and maybe never will. When you’ve buried your true self for four years in service to someone who happens to be the most divisive and unpopular former president since Richard Nixon, it’s not so easy to excavate yourself again. Pence, who describes himself as a “conservative, but not in a bad mood about it,” likes to be liked. “He would love to be reconciled to the president,” a confidant told me. “My sense is he’s seen that window close.” But neither is Pence willing to take the other path, reject the base who held his life in such low regard, and full-throatedly present himself as the man who saved democracy. “He’s not,” the confidant told me, “going to go Liz Cheney.”

“I think he’s got to decide whether he wants to be a Jim-Baker-like statesman that can just always be principled and speak the truth for the rest of his life, with no calculation of political cost,” this person told me. “Or do you want to get the nomination?”

Rather than choose, Pence seems to want both, offering himself as a bridge to nowhere between two increasingly incompatible wings of the party: traditional, center-right Republicans who want to move past Trump and Trump loyalists. “That’s the issue with Mike Pence, and that’s why he makes people so angry because he gets out there and half says the right thing, and then he cowers, and I get it,” Olivia Troye, his former national security adviser, told me. “It’s because of his political ambition.”…

(Also, Pence is none too bright, not that that’s ever deterred Republican voters before.)

Mike Pence just called the January 6th committee’s work “partisan.”

Dude…

THEY. TRIED. TO. FUCKING. HANG. YOU.

— Andrew Wortman (@AmoneyResists) December 19, 2022

Mike Pence was asked to testify before our committee and refused.

He now wishes to downplay Trump’s incitement of insurrection as the result of bad legal advice. Really?

Seems Pence’s only concern now is positioning himself to run in 2024.

The American people deserve better. pic.twitter.com/Dwpq0hLW3c

— Adam Schiff (@RepAdamSchiff) December 20, 2022

Repub Stupidity Open Thread: Shut Up, PencePost + Comments (100)

Jan. 6 Committee Final Report Executive Summary (Lawfare Live at 10 am)

by WaterGirl|  December 20, 20229:50 am| 147 Comments

This post is in: Jan 6: Hearings, Jan 6: Insurrection, Open Threads

Interested in hearing a discussion of the Executive Summary of the final report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol?

On Tuesday, Dec. 20 at 10 a.m. ET, Lawfare senior editors will discuss the newly released executive summary.

I think we’re going to learn a lot more in the next few days as the floodgates open.

Jan. 6 Committee Final Report Executive Summary (Lawfare Live at 10 am)Post + Comments (147)

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