To understand how Donald Trump’s desperation and lies became a potent danger to democracy, consider the ginger mints.
Mints featured in one of the absurdist but toxic episodes fleshed out in the Jan. 6 hearings, which now pause even as the Justice Department presses ahead on a parallel criminal investigation that it calls the most important in its history.A mother-daughter team at a Georgia elections center shared the treat during a long election night. Someone videotaped them and chose to believe the mint mother gave to daughter was a USB port.
With seven Democrats working with two Republicans on the outs with their party, the committee did what Trump's two impeachment trials couldn't — establish a coherent story out of the chaos instead of two partisan ones clawing at each other. He was told the rioters were out to find his vice president, Mike Pence, at the Capitol and hang him. Trump's chief of staff related to another aide the president’s thoughts on the matter, that Pence “deserves it,” according to testimony.“They’re not here to hurt ME,” he said, according to testimony. "Take the effing mags away. Let my people in, they can march to the Capitol from here. Let the people in, take the effing mags away.” It is unlikely he said "effing.
That bedrock convulsed as Trump and his allies contemplated an executive order to seize voting machines and other steps that democracies don't take. Saying no to the boss is never easy. Saying no to the U.S. president you work for is another thing altogether. The Republican election official in Georgia said no to cooking the results to deliver Trump the state, never losing his cool on the phone with the president. The Republican House speaker in Arizona, pressed to appoint fake electors, invoked his oath and said no way.
“We’ve got lots of theories,” he told Rusty Bowers, Arizona House speaker. “We just don’t have the evidence.” He’s made no public statements as to whether the department might pursue a criminal case against Trump, noting that the agency does not conduct its investigations in public. Yet he said he regards this one as the “most important” and sweeping it’s ever undertaken.
Facing a Trump-backed primary opponent in August, her congressional seat in deep-red Wyoming in danger, she framed the stakes for fellow Republican lawmakers at the first hearing: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
She hasn’t worn that shirt since, says she never will. Her explanation for why not, broadcast to America, did more than make for captivating television. It put a human face on the impact of the pressure-and-smear campaigns wielded by the president and his allies. Since then, she said: “I don’t want anyone knowing my name. I don’t want to go anywhere with my mom because she might yell my name out over the grocery aisle or something. I don’t go to the grocery store at all. I haven’t been anywhere at all.
In her composed account, the president was prone to fits of rage, heaving a porcelain plate of food against a White House wall when he learned his attorney general had publicly contradicted his claims of vast voter fraud. “Keep in touch with me,” Hutchinson quoted Cipollone as telling her. "We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable if we make that movement happen.”
Fiona Hill, a leading witness in Trump’s first impeachment because of her insights as the president's Russia adviser, said Hutchinson took all sorts of risks to step up and tell what she knew, so early in her career. Despite her junior position in the White House, she exercised the power of listening to the senior people around her, and so will shape history.
Three senior Justice officials testified to the committee, among them the acting attorney general at the time, Jeffrey Rosen. The men described in granular detail how they presented a united front against Trump's badgering. Such a crisis would eclipse the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when the attorney general and his deputy both resigned rather than execute Richard Nixon's order to fire the Watergate prosecutor.
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