The January 6th Hearings. Part 7: Assembling the Mob

For three hours, all this atheist could get out was "Jesus!" "My gawd!" "Holy christ on a cracker." "Dear lordt are you kidding me?" 

You know it's serious.

On Tuesday we watched another jaw-dropping, chock-full-o'-facts hearing of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. This one focused on the Smelly Cheese's last-ditch plan for his coup: to set a violent mob upon the Capitol building. The building where our 535 representatives and senators, the vice president, and all of their staff members, were conducting the business of the People: certifying the Electoral College votes and officially declaring Joseph Robinette Biden Jr as our 46th president-elect.

The hearing featured statements and questioning by Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) 

The committee illustrated that it was clear to the outgoing president* that he had lost the election by December 14, 2020, when the Electoral College met and cast their votes, declaring that Biden had won the election by a vote of 306 to 232 electors.

All of his previous coup plot points had failed: he failed to win in the courts; he failed to strong-arm the state election officials and legislators; he failed to corrupt the Department of Justice; he failed to subvert the Electoral College; he failed to bully Mike Pence into abandoning his oath. The only "winning" he had in his pocket was his massive deception of millions of Americans who believed him. And, on his bidding, tens of thousands of them descended upon Washington D.C. that Wednesday, January 6. He would see to it that they would do his dirty work.

The committee started by laying the blame entirely at SCROTUS's feet. They rejected any attempts at blaming the ne'er-do-wells that orbited him. As Lyn Cheney succinctly put it: 

"President Trump is a 76-year-old man. He is not an impressionable child. Just like everyone else in our country, he is responsible for his own actions and his own choices. As our investigation has shown, Donald Trump had access to more detailed and specific information showing that the election was not actually stolen than almost any other American, and he was told this over and over again. No rational or sane man in his position could disregard that information and reach the opposite conclusion. And Donald Trump cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind, nor can any argument of any kind excuse President Trump's behavior during the violent attack on January 6th."

 Full stop.

Contrast with a real statesman president:

President Harry S Truman posing in the reproduction of the Oval Office at the Truman Library in 1959. The sign "The Buck Stops Here" was given to Truman by Fred M. Canfil on October 2, 1945. (Truman Library)

The committee reminded us that there was no evidence of fraud. Every official in his orbit knew there was no evidence. He was told there was no evidence over and over and over. They encouraged him to concede after the Electoral College met on December 14. But he still managed to find some sycophants that would help him assert the Big Lie and feed him what he wanted. And on December 18, 2020, some of those weasels got into the Oval Office and decided to conspire some more.

The Unhinged Meeting

On the evening of December 18, Team Crazy convened. That attorney from outer space Sydney Powell, the attorney from the bottom of the whiskey barrel, Rudy Giuliani, the CEO from Overstock.com (who?), and the most treasonous American since the Rosenbergs, Mike Flynn, all snuck in a side door into the White House and met with their supreme leader. 

Jesus.

They had been talking for 10-15 minutes before the president's official advisors got wind of it and sprinted to the Oval Office. It seems "Pat Cipollone set a new land speed record" according to Powell. It was at this meeting that Powell pushed her theories that long-deceased Hugo Chavez and Valezuelans had messed with the Dominion voting machines. Flynn promoted a theory that Nest thermostats were involved in connecting communications from around the world. 

Dear lordt are you kidding me? 

Team Normal soon joined the meeting. It got heated. And then it became, as Cassidy Hutchinson described it, "unhinged." For the next several hours -- about six hours -- this "meeting" turned ugly. What ensued? Screaming, flying insults, and it nearly came to fisticuffs! It moved like a schoolyard rumble from the Oval Office to the Roosevelt Room, to the "Yellow Oval," which is the president's office in the residence, and back again. 

Holy christ on a cracker. 

The Toddler-in-Chief wanted to draft an executive order to seize voting machines from the states. He also, by virtue of his saying so, named Sydney Powell as special prosecutor and granted that whack-job security clearance! The Whitewash House advisors in Team Normal tried to push back on the cray-cray conspiracy theorists. Giuliani gleefully recalled that he called the advisors "pussies" and at one point had been alone in the Cabinet Room, "which is kind of cool. I really liked that, all my — all by myself."

My gawd.

Cipallone and others all described the chaos within in the Unhinged Meeting and the one question weaving throughout the evening that was never answered: Where is the evidence?

Finally, sometime after midnight, Mark Meadows himself escorted Giuliani out, as Cassidy Hutchinson said, to "make sure he didn't wander back into the mansion." The ruckus finally ended. Did this mean that the president* took the better advice of his inner circle and decided to finally concede? HA! No! Shortly thereafter, at 1:42 a.m. on December 19, 2020, Twitler issued his beckoning tweet. 

And after that, he tweeted more than a dozen times to promote the event.

The Organization

His devoted followers took his tweet and ran. Social media was buzzing from the get-go. The very next day, they started to organize. Hours after his 1:42 a.m. tweet, Women for America First, a pro-T**** organization, changed the permit for their rally from January 22 to January 6. And in the following days, a disturbing alliance began forming between far-right militia groups such as the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. Homeland Security intelligence official Dr. Donell Harvin described how after the initial tweet there developed a "blended ideology" as nonaligned groups became aligned. He became quite concerned.

King Ketchup knew his followers were ready for war. Keep in mind that Roger Stone and Michael Flynn were both closely aligned with these groups. The groups' leaders saw an opportunity for legitimacy as they communicated and coordinated with those traitors. Stone and Flynn, of course, are close allies of 45, and there is no way that he did not know what was brewing. 

It came to light after the hearing that the committee chose to forego illustrating the ties the Traitor-in-Chief had to the alt-right groups in favor of including long-sought testimony from Pat Cipollone. I hope they show that evidence. It will be in their final report, but it is important for us to see it. 

Social media developed a growing hum, with all the alt-right groups' planning and coordination. They were whipped up by people such as Alex Jones and Ali Alexander, de facto alt-right leaders and agitators. The language in videos and tweets were clearly war-like. "Locked and loaded," lists of weapons to bring, cries of "1776!" and "Ready for civil war!" The website thedonald.win had discussions going about the tunnel system in the Capitol building. Even "milder" Steve Bannon made a provocative video the day before the 6th. It was all there, in plain sight and in plain language. They had accepted the president's* invitation and were gearing for war.

Deaf Ears

The committee wasn't the first one to connect the dots between The Tangerine Toddler's tweeted invitation and continuing promotion of the January 6 event and the alt-right's open organization. At least one Twitter employee expressed concern about the growing chatter. This individual (who was anonymous and voice-disguised in their testimony) had urged Twitter to take action reigning in T**** ever since his "stand back and stand by" comments during the September 29th presidential debate. The warnings were ignored. The Twitter employee's concern only grew after the December 19 tweet, but their concerns continued to be dismissed. They testified that if it were any other person on the planet, the account would have been shut down long before. The day before the 6th, they said, they feared the violence that was coming. 

The Congressional Conspirators

On December 21, several Republican members of Congress met with the President to discuss the upcoming certification ceremony. These members of the U.S. House of Representatives were invited to the Whitewash House to discuss the "Eastman theory," that Pence could reject the count and interrupt the peaceful transfer of power. It's the usual suspects:

• Mo Brooks
• Brian Babin
• Andy Biggs
• Matt Gaetz
• Louie Gohmert
• Paul Gosar
• Andy Harris
• Jody Hice
• Jim Jordan
• Scott Perry
• Marjorie Taylor Greene

The Night Before the Insurrection

The committee outlined TЯUMP's activities on the night before the 6th. 

First, he spoke to Steve Bannon twice that day. After his first phone call, Bannon made a video and said, "All hell is going to break loose tomorrow. It's all converging and now we're on, as they say, the point of attack, right, the point of attack tomorrow. I'll tell you this, it's not going to happen like you think it's going to happen, Ok? It's going to be quite extraordinarily different. And all I can say is strap in." Strap in. Point of attack. Are those not words of war?

Later that day, there was a rally at the Freedom Plaza, just a couple blocks as the crow flies from the Whitewash House. The Douche of Hazard brought his aides into the Oval Office and insisted on opening the door so that he could hear the rally. He was quite excited and fired up about the energy coming from the rally. 

At the rally, people like Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, and Ali Alexander were riling the crowd with more war-like rhetoric. 

As he sat in the Oval Office listening to the rally, he tweeted "Washington is being inundated with people who don't want to see an election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats. Our country has had enough. They won't take it anymore. To the crowds gathering in DC he added, we hear you and love you from the Oval Office." 

Then he set about revising his speech.

The Rhetoric 

It was the rhetoric that brought his troops to the front, and it was his words that sent them to do violence. 45 knew that his words were powerful to his followers. You recall from a prior hearing that SCROTUS had a phone call with Mike Pence the morning of the 6th, in which he became very agitated and called Pence a "wimp" and a "pussy" for resisting the pressure to break the law and refuse to certify the electoral votes. After that phone call, he wanted to re-write his speech to include statements about Mike Pence. 

He and his speech writer swamp lizard Stephen Miller set about adding lines like, "we will see whether Mike Pence enters history as a truly great and courageous leader. All he has to do is refer the illegally submitted electoral votes back to the states that were given false and fraudulent information where they want to recertify." After much back and forth with the lawyers, they removed that line but added one reference to Pence. True to form, however, the next morning the Commander-in-Cheese ad-libbed seven more statements about Pence as he spoke to the armed crowd. The word "peacefully" was removed and words about "fighting" were inserted. And he ad-libbed numerous references to going to the Capitol, including the one about him joining them.

He knew exactly what he was doing.

Live Witnesses

We heard from two live witnesses, one regular Joe from Ohio who participated in the Insurrection but was not part of any organized group, and the former media director of the Oath Keepers, who had resigned from the organization years ago and was not in Washington D.C. that day. 

Stephen Ayers from Ohio gave us some insight into the many participants who were not part of any group. He testified that he bought all of what Uncle Scam was selling. In his gee-whiz Hicksville drawl, his testimony pretty much consisted of, "Welp, we went cuz 45 asked us to. When he told us to leave, we did."

Simple, but telling: They truly believed him, and they were simply following orders. 

Ayers gave good advice to the millions who still "hang on every word" of the former president*: "Biggest thing for me is take the blinders off, make sure you step back and see what's going on before it's too late."

Ayers has pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct during the insurrection and will be sentenced in September.

The second witness, Jason Van Tatenhove, was entrenched with the Oath Keepers for years as a media guy. He worked for the group from approximately 2014 to 2016. Van Tatenhove issued a stark warning about this group, saying they are a dangerous armed militia and have nefarious goals. He testified that the Oath Keepers are a dangerous paramilitary organization and that January 6th fit into their goals of a violent revolution. One shocking tidbit that Van Tatenhove offered was that the leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, wanted him to develop a deck of cards, like those the military had during the Middle East conflicts, with political enemies depicted, including Hillary Clinton as the queen of hearts.

The Final Bombshell of the Day 

Lyn Cheney did what she does best: dropped another stick of dynamite in the final moments of the hearing. She revealed that a witness that has met with the committee, but that the public hasn't heard from yet, got a call from Don the Con himself. Instead of answering the call or responding, the witness alterted their lawyer who alerted the committee. The matter has been turned over to the DOJ.

Ann Telnaes

The Next Hearing

The eighth, and presumably final, hearing will be next week. It is expected to take place on Thursday, July 21 during primetime. We'll hear about the actions, or rather inactions, that Old McFraudle undertook during the day on January 6. Check your local listings, and head over to the Church of LSR afterwards.

In the meantime, if you missed it, here is Tuesday's hearing in its entirety. 

Click here for Part 8: Dereliction of Duty