The stakes just got even higher
The Lincoln Project live-streamed the House Select Committee meeting yesterday. To say it was riveting is an understatement. Watching and listening to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s testimony as the committee played excerpts from Trump’s phone call was jaw dropping. Sure, we’ve all heard it before, but in the context in which it was played and how it was used as exclamation points was spellbinding. Adam Schiff handled questioning Tuesday. He sounded like the prosecutor he is, and he elicited damning testimony from witnesses.
Brad Raffensperger was visibly shaken when Schiff questioned him about threats he received. His wife received sexually explicit text messages, and his daughter-in-law’s house was broken into. She is a widow with two small children. No, Donald Trump didn’t break in her house, but he certainly caused all the chaos that led to that break-in and other horrific stories. Liz Cheney showed the video from December with Georgia SOS COO Gabriel Sterling imploring Trump to stop his nonsense because it was endangering people. You could feel Sterling’s anger and other emotions as he pled with the so-called president and senators to put a stop to the lie, yet it continues to this day. CBS News reported just the other day that the Texas Republican Party voted to reject the results of the 2020 election. None of them seem to understand the consequences of this behavior, nor do they care. All they care about is power, and anyone in their way is merely collateral damage.
The point the committee is trying to make is something we already know: Donald Trump would sacrifice anyone and anything to retain his hold on the White House. The committee laid out in detail via witnesses that these people were placed in danger simply because Donald Trump couldn’t have what we wanted. The insurrectionists came within 40 feet of Mike Pence, and their counterparts came close to others. The goal of the committee was to show that what Trump did to Pence “was not an isolated event.” We saw in real time just how determined Trump was to hold onto an office for which he was woefully unqualified and in which he was no longer wanted by the majority.
The House Select Committee has literally only begun to break the surface of the players behind January 6. According to Politico Playbook, the committee has subpoenaed Alex Holder, a documentary filmmaker who shot interviews with Trump and his inner circle before and after January 6. Playbook obtained a copy of the subpoena and revealed that the committee is looking for raw footage from January 6 and interviews with Trump, Trump Jr., Ivanka, Eric, and Jared Kushner. They are also hoping to obtain any footage of discussions surrounding election fraud. Playbook reported that Holder is expected to cooperate, and that cooperation should bring out additional interesting information.
Make no mistake: the committee wants to see Donald Trump prosecuted, and he should be. What he did was wrong on every level. He should not continue to prosper from creating chaos because he didn’t get what he wanted.
Shirley is a former entertainment writer and has worked in the legal field for over 25 years