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Tuesday morning is going to be interesting, as is Thursday evening prime time. The next hearings of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6, 2021 Attack on Congress are going to get into “who and how” territory.
This comes while the stunning revelations from the committee’s last public session have yet to be fully analyzed. “Shiny object” disputes about tabloid-ready details of Cassidy Hutchinson's testimony like her account of being told of Trump’s assault on a Secret Service agent for refusing to drive him to the Capitol - though there is absolutely no doubt he intended to go there and there is photographic evidence of some sort of “heated discussion” going on in the presidential Suburban - have done their job of distracting attention from the emerging clues about the coup plot.
First, this bizarre fracas Hutchinson related being told about by Anthony Ornato was not merely another impulsive outburst by an enraged Donald Trump. The refusal by his Secret Service detail to take him to the Capitol infuriated him because his trip to the hill and presence at the attack was part of an elaborate plan he and his gang were trying to execute after he dispatched a mob he knew to be armed and angry with the intent to intimidate Pence from certifying Joe Biden’s election as president.
However, Ornato’s account of Trump Going Wild is far less significant than what Hitchinson testified Rudy Giuliani told her on January 2, four days before the event.
According to her testimony, Giuliani said: "Are you excited? The sixth is going to be a great day. We're going to the Capitol. The president's going to be there. He's going to look powerful. He's going to be with the members [of Congress], he's going to be with the senators. Talk to the chief about it, he knows about it."
“The chief” was Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, Hutchinson’s boss. When Hutchinson did mention Guiliani’s cryptic chat to Meadows, he said: "There's a lot going on, Cass. Things might get real, real bad on January 6."
In fact, things got worse than "real bad," and they could have gotten worse. Defending his constitutional responsibilities, Pence was refusing to accept the fake electors the conspirators had ginned up, or to send the electoral count back to the states to be "fixed" by Republican state legislators.
That led to a gambit to remove him and replace him with Sen. Chuck Grassley, president pro tempore of the Senate. On January 5, Grassley suddenly blurted the plan to a reporter: "Well, first of all, I will be — if the vice president isn't there, and we don't expect him to be there, I will be presiding over the Senate."
Couple that with the fact that on January 6, at the height of the riot, with seditionists roaming the capitol looking to grab him and kill him, Pence refused to get into a vehicle with Secret Service agents from his detail because he feared they planned to kidnap him to prevent the certification of Biden's victory.
What if that had happened?
With Pence missing, Grassley could have carried out the plot. While his Senate staff moved quickly to whitewash his incriminating remark, Eastman’s emails prove the conspirators wanted Grassley, not Pence, to oversee the count because they knew he would perform as required..
Grassley's top aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee was Barbara Ledeen, a notorious far right intriguer who is married to Michael Ledeen, one of the top far right mis-information specialists in Conservatism, Inc. She is closely associated with Ginni Thomas, who is known to have spent a lot of time and energy promoting the coup in emails and texts to Meadows and others. After initially saying she would be “happy” top testify to the committee about her actions, Thomas has now denied that agreement to testify and is no longer "eager" to answer questions under oath. Why?
What may emerge this week is information regarding the precise roles played by Roger Stone and Mike Flynn and the events of the White House meeting on the evening of December 18, 2020, where Flynn urged Trump to seize voting machines and conduct a new “election” under military control. Both Stone and Flynn took the Fifth Amendment when they were interviewed by the committee, with Flynn doing so even when asked if he supported the peaceful transition of power under the Constitution.
What is definitely going to come out on Tuesday is the role of the fascist paramilitary leadership of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, and their connection to the upper reaches of Conspiracy Management, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Trump Organization, LLC.
Last Friday, former White House counsel Pat Cipollone testified for eight hours without invoking the Fifth Amendment.
There's a lot more information that we will soon know. And it’s very likely to go from "real, real bad" to Really Goddamned Awful.
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For more on Pence’s security team’s distrust of the trump secret service ‘Gestapo’ read
Another Substack contributor Adam from Civil WarII has an extensive newsletter on the failure of the secret service guarding trump to remain apolitical, especially the infamous Tony ornato.
https://civilwarii.substack.com/p/there-is-no-indication-of-civil-disobedience?utm_source=email
A quote from the newsletter:
From The Washington Post’s excerpt of Carol Leonnig’s and Phil Rucker’s book:
Around this time, Kellogg ran into Tony Ornato in the West Wing. Ornato, who oversaw Secret Service movements, told him that Pence’s detail was planning to move the vice president to Joint Base Andrews.
“You can’t do that, Tony,” Kellogg said. “Leave him where he’s at. He’s got a job to do. I know you guys too well. You’ll fly him to Alaska if you have a chance. Don’t do it.”
Kellogg is a highly decorated retired Army Lt General serving as Pence’s security advisor. Tragic that someone with the Kellogg’s distinguished and highly decorated military career could not understand that trump was a maniacal, amoral dictator wanna be!
Grassley is up for re-election. Like so many of these scoundrels, he and they all 147 plus should be turned out of office and never allowed to run for office again! If any of you receive Jamelle Bouie's newsletters, his latest one suggests some current books he's reading that focus on the situation of the court - no longer supreme if it ever was - but for now certainly a linchpin in pushing the nation into a one party Fascist state. The hearings will be explosive this week for sure. I sense the secret service has problems in the ranks with partisan hacks. Pence is no hero but at least he stayed in place and did not let his security detail whisk him away to God only knows where.