The House Jan. 6 select committee's fourth day of public hearings about its investigation into the Capitol riot began today at 1 p.m. ET. The topic of focus was then-President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn 2020 election results in several states, including Arizona and Georgia.
Our contributors today were MSNBC Daily writer and editor Hayes Brown, MSNBC Daily columnists Jessica Levinson and Frank Figliuzzi, and "The Rachel Maddow Show" legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
The men and women who refused to allow evil to triumph
After today’s hearing I can’t help but think of the quote, sometimes misattributed to Sir Edmund Burke, that goes something like this: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Today we saw good people — public servants like Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, Georgia Secretary of the State Brad Raffensperger, Fulton County election workers Shaye Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman, Georgia election official Gabriel Sterling, and others — who chose to do something despite withering pressure to acquiesce to evil. These people became not a “thin blue line” — a common police reference — but a thin red, white and blue line that separated right from wrong, morality from criminality. And they serve as a stark reminder of how perilously close we came to losing our way as a nation, but for the moral compass of a handful of Americans who kept us pointed true North.
The committee reconvenes on Thursday for a hearing that’s expected to focus on how DOJ officials helped stop Trump and his allies from overturning the election. Follow along with MSNBC’s live blog coverage at msnbc.com/jan6hearings.
Former DOJ official Rich Donoghue moves to center stage
Although former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue has not appeared personally at any of the House’s four hearings so far, audio clips of his interview with the committee have been featured several times. We heard Donoghue today, for example, testify that he personally told Trump the so-called “suitcase full of ballots” story was false. At the hearing’s end, the committee also aired Donoghue’s statement that if Trump had fired then-Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replaced him with environmental lawyer and acting-Associate Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark, Donoghue would immediately resign. There was “no way I’m serving one minute under this guy, Jeff Clark,” Donoghue claims he told Trump.
Clark’s attempt to depose his then-boss (Rosen) and use the DOJ as a vehicle for overturning the election will be one focus of Thursday’s hearing. And based on the use of taped Donoghue quotes to date, we can expect him to take center stage as a live witness.
Like other star witnesses, Donoghue is a committed Republican and former Trump loyalist. He served in Trump’s Justice Department throughout his presidency, first as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, and later as Jeff Rosen’s chief deputy and then acting-Deputy Attorney General after Bill Barr left the department in December 2020. But, as with Barr and Rosen, he ultimately parted ways with the president. Alongside Rosen, Donoghue led the resistance to Clark’s installation as attorney general and a related plan for DOJ to encourage state legislatures to choose their own (read: Trump) electors. And it was only when Trump could not get the DOJ to play ball that he was forced to approach the problem sideways: through Pence.
Trump said the election was stolen. He stole their freedom.
The litany of crimes that Trump appears to have committed in the aftermath of the 2020 election are real and a threat to our democracy. But what Shaye Moss described in today’s hearing may be the vilest of them.
Trump and his supporters spread the conspiracy that Moss and her mother, Ruby Freeman, had worked to help steal the election from Trump in Georgia.
Moss described to the committee how the weight of what had come down on her and her family left her feeling guilty. Guilty for becoming an election worker. Guilty for choosing to help people. Guilty for making it so her mother had to leave her home because of threats to her life.
“I felt like it was all my fault,” she told the committee today. It was not her fault. It was Trump who brought this fear and strife to Moss and Freeman’s lives.
In his quest to remain in power, Trump robbed Moss and Freeman of the freedoms that he as president should have protected. He has stolen from them the dignity of their names and the ability to live in their neighborhood in peace.
Trump has taken so much from this country over the last five years. It can be easy to forget the seemingly smaller crimes that he has committed, the little but no less precious things that he has left ruined in his wake.
Pat, if you’re listening…
Cheney used a large part of her closing statement to call-out former White House counsel Pat Cipollone. We’ve heard plenty of times already about Cipollone’s doubts and objections during the lead-up to Jan. 6. But the committee has yet to speak with him directly — and Cheney is clearly getting impatient.
As Thompson emphasized early in the hearing, this investigation is still ongoing. People who have knowledge about what went on inside the White House and throughout this scheme are still encouraged to come forward. It’s unclear what would actually get Cipollone to testify, but the willingness to shout out the former president’s lawyer so directly shows how much the committee wants to hear from him.
What America owes election workers like Shaye Moss
The right to vote is a dearly held, foundational right. Too many members of our country had to fight for this right.
But the right to vote is a hollow promise without the election workers who allow us to exercise that right.
Trump and Giuliani falsely accused Moss and her mother of engaging in election fraud when they were counting ballots. Giuliani accused Moss and her mother Ruby Freeman of passing each other a USB drive. What was actually being passed? A ginger mint.
As a result of these baseless accusations, Moss and her mother were the subject of vile, racist, hateful threats, including death threats. Moss and her mother were forced into hiding.
And why did Moss serve as an election worker? Because she wants to help uphold the rule of law. Because she gets that without people like her, we no longer live in a functioning democracy.
Just imagine what happens when we allow anyone, let alone the leader of the free world and his advisers, to force election workers into hiding based on lies and false accusations. We can’t hold elections that way. We can’t hold together a country that way.
Ruby Freeman appears at hearing, despite death threats
In advance of today’s hearing, the committee announced that Shaye Moss, a Georgia elections worker falsely accused of tampering with votes in 2020, would testify. That itself was stunning, considering the threats to her life.
Yet even more surprising was that Moss’ mother, Ruby Freeman, accompanied her at the hearing. Freeman, as Reuters documented extensively last December, not only was “demonized” by Trump and his allies, but also was pressured by a former aide to rapper Kanye West to confess to election crimes that neither she nor Moss committed. She testified that “people would come to her home in 48 hours, and she’d go to jail.”
Freeman ultimately went into hiding after the FBI notified her that she needed to leave her home for her own safety. Today, as videotaped testimony revealed, Freeman remains fearful when anyone says her name in public.
“I’ve lost my name, and I’ve lost my reputation; I’ve lost my sense of security,” Freeman stated plainly. And yet, in the name of democracy and history, she came to today’s hearing in person, a living reminder of the human costs of Trump’s “big lie.”
It’s still wild to hear the president of the United States beg for votes
It’s been over a year and a half since the audio of Trump’s call with Brad Raffensperger first leaked to the press. We knew about that call even before the attack on the Capitol. And yet even after all that time, it’s still bonkers to hear the then-president of the United States, almost two months after the election, cajole, threaten and implore an elected state official to find a way to declare him the winner.
“All I need is 11,000 votes,” he told Raffensperger. “Fellas, I need 11,000 votes.” There’s no way to recognize Trump’s plea as anything but a directive. Find those votes, even if the physical ballots reflecting the desired outcome don’t exist.
At the time of the call, as the committee has previously made clear, Trump had been told over and over again that the election was fair and that he had lost in Georgia. And yet he still was telling the same lie to his supporters on the morning of Jan. 6.
Raffensperger: 'Numbers don't lie'
Raffensperger spent much of his testimony today explaining why Trump’s voter fraud accusations during their infamous Jan. 2 call were unfounded. But perhaps the secretary of state’s strongest moment was his insistence that he could not change the Georgia results because “the numbers are the numbers. The numbers don’t lie.”
And it’s not that Raffensperger, who favors a host of voting access restrictions opposed by Democrats, wasn’t willing to investigate. Raffensperger recounted how his staff had “nearly 300 investigations from the 2020 election,” including investigations of Trump’s allegations of thousands of underaged voters, nonregistered voters and voting felons.
In all cases, the numbers remained the numbers, and “President Trump came up short.” And Raffensperger said he was neither willing to fudge the numbers nor violate the Constitution.
What Trump didn't say is just as important
‘When the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised’
That’s what Trump told Frances Watson, the chief investigator for the Georgia secretary of state in a recorded call played by the Jan. 6 committee today. But what’s the flip side of that? What would you infer will happen if you don’t give the president of the United States the “right answer” he’s looking for?
First Trump dictated to Georgia’s secretary of the state the exact number of votes he needed to be manufactured, then he personally called the chief investigator and made an implied threat. But what he didn’t say is just as important.