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When he was asked if he had any regrets about his vote to impeach, Meijer said, “Not one. I would rather lose office with my character intact than stay reelected having made sacrifices of the soul.”
Press reports indicated there had been widespread opposition within the news staff at Fox to Tucker Carlson’s series because of its false and dangerous claims. Yet Fox News’s leadership decided to air it anyway. Lies about the January 6 attack were apparently acceptable programming; the truth about the election was not.
people I met with were willing to reconsider their embrace of Trump’s lies. Others remained defiant and angry. It can be tough to learn that you’ve been fooled, tricked by those you trusted. That you let yourself be deceived. The natural reaction is denial, and a refusal to listen to anything to the contrary.
however, Kevin McCarthy decided to withdraw all five of his nominees. For the next year and a half, he would argue that the Select Committee was irretrievably partisan because Pelosi had rejected his nominees. He suggested repeatedly that she had rejected all of his nominees, which of course was not true: McCarthy had chosen to withdraw all five nominees. It was a political tactic. He could easily have replaced Jordan and Banks.
We recognized, for example, that Donald Trump and his team had coordinated an effort to create fraudulent electoral-vote certifications in states that Joe Biden had won, to send these false slates to Congress for January 6, and to pressure Vice President Pence to disregard the genuine certifications from those states. We were in the process of evaluating whether §1512(c)(2) could apply to that conduct.
Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that former President Trump could not prevent the Committee from accessing the relevant documents. The court’s well-written opinion was memorable—and widely quoted for this point: “… Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”
Until you have heard it firsthand from the Capitol Police officers involved, it is difficult to understand how profoundly the violence affected them—and how angry these officers are with members of Congress who try to downplay everything that happened.
Of course, there is already substantial additional evidence that Trump was acting intentionally, making false statements to motivate his supporters and to raise money from them.
No rational human being could have heard all this information from multiple close advisers and still genuinely believed that the election was stolen. He lost. He knew it.
Cassidy Hutchinson had shown more courage and patriotism than White House officials in positions senior to hers, with many more years of experience.
