The House Jan. 6 select committee held its fifth public hearing into the Capitol riot today at 3 p.m. ET. The nine-member panel focused on then-President Donald Trump's efforts to get the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election.
Our contributors were MSNBC Daily writer and editor Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Daily columnists Jessica Levinson and Frank Figliuzzi, and "The Rachel Maddow Show" legal analyst Lisa Rubin.
Day 5 offers new evidence — and new mysteries
As at prior hearings, the House select committee offered new evidence today, including evidence of GOP congressmembers’ consciousness of guilt. (You don’t ask for a pardon unless you think there’s a decent chance you broke the law — and could be prosecuted.)
But some of the new evidence was just as puzzling as it was tantalizing. Consider two examples.
First, the committee asserted today that lawyer Ken Klukowski, who served in the Justice Department for a hot minute, collaborated with John Eastman and Jeffrey Bossert Clark on aspects of Trump’s scheme. But how did Klukowski come to DOJ, where, as Liz Cheney noted, he was specifically assigned to Clark, in the first place?
One clue comes from the Dec. 28, 2021 email the committee showed today, in which GOP activist and Family Research Council fellow Ken Blackwell advocated that Eastman and Klukowski brief Pence and his team. That email was sent to two people: Rep. Louis Gohmert’s chief of staff, Connie Hair, and Ed Corrigan, the president and CEO of the Conservative Partnership Institute, or CPI. If CPI sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s where Mark Meadows is now a “Senior Partner,” and it was the beneficiary of a $1 million donation from Trump in the weeks after the select committee was created.
What sway, if any, Corrigan and Hair had over Pence and his staff is unknown. But it bears noting that Corrigan had prior experience filling administration jobs for Trump; as his CPI bio reads, he led “the personnel selection process for all domestic policy departments” for Trump’s 2016 transition.
Second, the committee noted, in describing the run up to the Jan. 3, 2021 Oval Office meeting, that Jeff Clark was already being referred to as the acting attorney general on White House call logs late that afternoon. The absence of call logs for Jan. 6 itself has already been thoroughly explored, but is it possible that such logs for other, significant days reveal more than we would have expected? Looks like we’ll have to wait at least until hearings resume next month to find out.
Lordy, there are contemporaneous handwritten notes
One highlight from today: The committee showed notes then-acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue reportedly took in December 2020 that describe Trump’s pressure campaign against the DOJ.
Peruse at your leisure, but Donoghue's notation about "another difficult meeting" feels exponentially relatable — on multiple levels.
Trump tried to turn the DOJ into his 'Ministry of Propaganda'
Today's hearing underscored Trump's failed attempt to mold the Justice Department into his own personal Ministry of Propaganda.
“Donald Trump didn’t just want the Justice Department to investigate, he wanted the Justice Department to help legitimize his lies,” committee Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in his opening remarks.
As Ja'han Jones wrote for The ReidOut Blog earlier today:
"Like all authoritarians, Trump wanted a division of officials who use propaganda and dubious legal tactics to carry out his lawless requests and cover up his wrongdoing. ... Thursday gave us a glimpse of how he tried to hammer his lies into his underlings’ minds."
Read Ja'han's full story below.
With less to lose, GOP's Brooks takes a step toward cooperating with the committee
According to The Washington Post's Jacqueline Alemany, Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama has become “the first GOP lawmaker to open the door to cooperating with the committee.”
In a letter to the House Jan. 6 committee, Brooks agreed to appear before the panel — but on very specific conditions. Among other things, he is demanding that his deposition must be public, that the questions pertain directly to the events of Jan. 6, and that he’s only interrogated by members of Congress (as opposed to staffers). He also questioned the committee chair’s statement on Wednesday that it had reissued a subpoena for him to appear before the panel because process servers failed to track him down for almost a month and a half. He called their inability to find him “puzzling,” implying that he had never been hiding in the first place.
The panel could choose to go along with Brooks’ conditions or, if they want him to participate in a manner that goes beyond what he said he’s willing to do, hold him in contempt of Congress. They’re particularly interested in allegations he made earlier this year that Trump had demanded he “rescind the 2020 elections” and “hold a new special election for the presidency.”
As I mentioned earlier, Brooks’ feelings about testifying and what he’s willing to say has likely been influenced by his loss in a Senate primary runoff on Tuesday, and his announced decision to retire from politics. He doesn’t have quite as much to lose anymore.
Pardon me?
One of the revelations today is that Republican Rep. Mo Brooks sought pardons for every member of Congress and every senator who voted to reject the slate of electors sent by Arizona and Pennsylvania. Not to be outdone by Brooks, Reps. Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, Louie Gohmert and Scott Perry all sought pardons.
Accepting a pardon does not automatically admit guilt. Neither does asking for one. But we are all free to draw our own conclusions as to why these pardons were sought. Perhaps, some lawmakers feared politically motivated criminal charges by Biden’s future DOJ. Perhaps. But another explanation, arguably the much more straightforward explanation, is that these members of Congress knew or feared they broke the law.
How former DOJ official Steve Engel finally forced Trump’s hand
On January 3, 2021, in a meeting I often shorthand as the “Oval Office Showdown,” then-Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark played perhaps the highest stakes episode of “The Apprentice” ever. There, in front of former Trump, Clark faced off with lawyers from the DOJ and the White House, all of whom formally or functionally outranked him.
The group, as then-Acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen and his deputy Rich Donoghue have repeatedly testified, was united in their opposition to Trump’s installing Clark as attorney general, and all marshaled different arguments to a skeptical, even scoffing Trump about the damage such a move would do to the country, DOJ, and even himself. But as the committee showed today, White House call logs reflect that by early evening on that day, the White House was already referring to Clark as the acting attorney general. Trump, it appeared, had made his decision — but was willing to give his lawyers one last shot to talk him out of it.
The person who appears to have finally gotten through to Trump was Steve Engel, a long-serving DOJ lawyer who had interacted with Trump extensively throughout his presidency.
Specifically, various participants made clear that they would resign, whether from the White House or DOJ, if he appointed Clark in Rosen’s stead. Trump took that in, and then turned to Engel, asking whether even he would resign. As Engel testified, he told Trump plainly, “I could not be part of this.” Engel added that Clark “would be leading a graveyard,” a comment that Donoghue said “clearly had an impact on the president.” And through a combination of his prior loyalty and his clear willingness to leave, Engel thus walked the president back from a mass resignation — and a constitutional crisis.
The DOJ's lawyers are not the president’s personal lawyers
We are almost two hours into the Jan. 6 hearing’s presentation on Trump’s relentless pressure campaign to get the DOJ to open a sham investigation into his baseless election fraud claims. The entire afternoon has been a stark reminder of why the Department of Justice must be an independent agency, and must be guided by facts and the law, not the personal desires and predilections of the president. It does not act as the president’s private counsel.
This is why the DOJ stood firm, explaining that they lacked the power to look into baseless claims of a corrupted election and would not act as an arm of Trump’s reelection campaign. This is also why private attorneys — Giuliani and Powell, among others — took such a high-profile role in the election fraud schemes. Unlike DOJ, these unprincipled attorneys humored the president, pushed for the opening of investigations and submitted legal briefs seeking to overturn the election. (It’s also worth remembering that both Giuliani and Powell are facing legal sanctions for their roles in the post-election litigation).
Italy conspiracy theory pushed by Team Trump was 'pure insanity'
The former Justice Department officials testifying before the committee today have generally used measured, dispassionate language to describe Trump’s outrageous pressure campaign against them. But they’ve also had moments of colorful bluntness.
The committee showed a clip of a ludicrous YouTube video alleging some kind of conspiracy to manipulate votes involving a State Department official in Italy, British intelligence and the CIA. Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania shared the video with Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows and asked that the Trump administration to look into working with the Italian government in response to the kooky, evidence-free video.
This video was eventually forwarded to Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donoghue, as something to look into. As he explained during the hearing, Donoghue responded to it with a two-word email: “Pure insanity.”
During the hearing, Donoghue explained how he found the video “patently absurd.” Then Trump’s former acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, explained how he had to repeatedly tell Meadows that he was unwilling to meet with proponents of the conspiracy theory.
When the Jan. 6 hearings are also free publicity
Filmmaker Alex Holder, who was interviewed by House committee members behind closed doors today, isn't wasting the current public interest in his as-yet-unseen footage. Holder's tweet seems to be pushing back on any critics who claim he gave his subjects too much autonomy. Does the clip actually prove that? Opinions may differ.