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**JUNE 21, 2022**

Meyerson on TAP

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**** The Theater and the News

Tuesday's January 6th hearing was devised to pack an emotional wallop,
but the real news had to seep through the cracks.

Tuesday's hearing of the Committee to Investigate the January 6th
Insurrection came in two parts: the theater and the news. While the
Committee is doing a fine job of dramatizing the scope, depth and
details of Donald Trump's plot to stay in power, the actual news on
Tuesday came in the form of an aside and a coming attraction.

The aside was the revelation that on the morning of January 6th, an aide
to Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson told an aide to Vice-President
Mike Pence that Johnson wanted to provide Pence with the slates of
pro-Trump/alternative/faux electors from both Michigan and Johnson's
own Wisconsin. Presumably, the idea was to give Pence something to hold
in his hands as he rejected the slates of Biden electors that those
states had rightly certified, and reinstalled Trump in power.

The real news here, of course, is that this revelation definitely should
and perhaps could hurt Johnson, already the one Republican senator who
could well lose his seat to a Democrat in November's election, with
some subset of Wisconsin swing voters- particularly the subset that
won't take kindly to Johnson's attempt to nullify Wisconsin
voters' verdict in the 2020 election, or at least to the precedent
that such a move would set.

The coming attraction was the appeal from the committee's Republican
vice-chair, Liz Cheney, to Trump's White House Counsel, Pat Cipolloni,
to come testify before the committee. This followed some recorded
testimony in which an aide to Trump's chief-of-staff Mark Meadows
related that Cipolloni and others in the Counsel's office had told
Trump that his efforts to create uncertified slates of Trump electors in
states Joe Biden had carried were patently illegal, particularly after
every court had dismissed Trump's unsubstantiated claims of voter
fraud.

Noting that Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon had refused the committee's
subpoena to testify, and that John Eastman, Roger Stone and Michael
Flynn had shown up only to avoid answering any questions by taking the
Fifth, Cheney more or less implied that Cipolloni could well end up
lumped with those crackpots in the verdict of history if he didn't
appear.

None of the witnesses who actually appeared on Tuesday need fear such a
verdict. Rusty Bowers, the Republican Speaker of Arizona's House of
Representatives, and Brad Raffensperger, the Republican Secretary of
State in Georgia, both testified how Trump and Rudy Giuliani had
pressured them-in Bowers' case, to convene the legislature to
nullify the state's vote for Biden, and in Raffensperger's, to
"find" just enough votes to toss the state to Trump. As we already knew,
both declined to do Trump's bidding. Bowers recounted how he continued
to press Giuliani for any evidence of voter fraud, with Rudy admitting
at one point that he had "theories but no evidence." Raffensperger
testified that the phone call in which Trump alternately threatened and
cajoled him to find those 11,000-plus votes had lasted 67 minutes,
trotting out one disproven claim after another to somehow bolster his
pleading. Any dispassionate observer was compelled to conclude that by
dint simply of the length of the call, Raffensperger is underpaid.

Gabriel Sterling, the Republican COO of Raffensperger's office,
recounted the threats and abuse that Trump's supporters heaped on
Georgia's election workers, and two such workers in one of the Atlanta
vote tabulation centers, Shaye Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman,
recounted what they experienced when Trump and Giuliani personally
attacked them for their election-night processing of ballots, which,
Rudy and the Donald alleged, involved hauling in Biden ballots and
running them multiple times through the tabulation machines.

The videos taken at their voting center showed nothing of the sort. Moss
and Freeman did nothing but their jobs-to which Sterling, Trump's
Attorney General Bill Barr, and Trump's U.S. Attorney for Northern
Georgia, Byung Pak, all testified, also testifying that they'd told
Trump or his crew that the president's claims were, in Barr's
carefully chosen word, "bullshit." Nonetheless, Moss and Freeman
continued to be attacked in talks and tweets from Trump and Giuliani,
and were repeatedly threatened by Trump's minions. Freeman, at the
FBI's suggestion, actually moved out of her home lest she be hurt or
killed, and Moss reluctantly resigned her job with the Fulton County
election bureau.

As every high-ranking official who's come before the committee has
been a Republican, it should come as no surprise that a number have
justified their resistance to Trump's pressure not only by their duty
to uphold the law and the Constitution but also by their religious
faith. Arizona Speaker Bowers managed to fuse the two in his testimony
Tuesday, saying, "It is a tenet of my faith that the Constitution is
divinely inspired."

That's one of those statements that we should take seriously but not
literally, lest God be charged with such monstrosities as the Electoral
College, not to mention the uncertainty behind both Prohibition (the
Eighteenth Amendment) and the repeal of Prohibition (the Twenty-First
Amendment). But, hey-if belief in the divinity of the Constitution was
one of those things that led Republican officials to reject Trump's
bid to overrule the electorate, who am I to quibble?

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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