Is it just me, or is Liz Cheney kinda hot? https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/05/politics/january-6-committee-investigation-liz-cheney/index.html Rep. Liz Cheney, one of just two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the January 6 insurrection, has asserted that the attack was part of an "extremely well-organized" conspiracy. The Wyoming lawmaker's comments to CBS "Sunday Morning" come before the panel is set to hold its first public hearing on June 9 at 8 p.m. ET. The prime-time presentation will be an overview of the committee's 10-month investigation and set the stage for subsequent hearings, which are expected to cover certain topics or themes, sources previously told CNN. "It is extremely broad. It's extremely well organized. It's really chilling," Cheney told the outlet when asked if the attack amounted to a conspiracy, adding: "I have not learned anything that has made me less concerned." Committee members have teased that the hearings could be focused on former President Donald Trump's direct role in undermining the election results. Broadly, the panel has been working toward a thesis that Trump's obsession with the election loss and his peddling of false claims about the results is what laid the groundwork for the violent and deadly riot at the US Capitol. While the setup of the hearings has been a work in progress and evolving, sources previously told CNN, the presentations will likely feature video clips from January 6, as well as some of the roughly 1,000 interviews the committee has conducted behind closed doors. Cheney said Sunday that she's confident new evidence from the investigation will compel viewers' attention, as she charged that Trump's threat to democracy is ongoing. "We are not in a situation where former President Trump has expressed any sense of remorse about what happened. We are, in fact, in a situation where he continues to use even more extreme language, frankly, than the language that caused the attack," she said in the interview. "And so, people must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don't defend it." Ahead of the hearings, Trump's team has communicated to some of his most loyal acolytes on Capitol Hill that the former President wants people vigorously defending him and pushing back on the select committee while the public hearings play out, according to GOP sources familiar with the request. In Congress, the targeted response to the hearings will be overseen by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who has been coordinating the response effort with GOP members. "We are thankfully not at a moment of civil war, but we are certainly at a time of testing," Cheney said. "We are absolutely in a moment where we have to make a decision about whether we're going to put our love of this country above partisanship. And to me, there's just, there's no gray area in that question."
CAN THE JAN. 6 COMMITTEE BREAK THROUGH IN PRIME TIME? https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/06/can-the-jan-6-committee-break-through-in-prime-time Some panel members have hyped the upcoming public hearings as a Watergate-style moment, a chance to make their case in the court of public opinion. Yet one week out, the schedule—in Congress and on TV—is still being hashed out. Over the past year, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack has reportedly conducted more than 1,000 interviews and amassed more than 100,000 documents. What the panel has uncovered behind closed doors has largely stayed there, with the exception of some leaks and one public hearing in July 2021. That’s set to change next week, at 8 p.m. on June 9, when the select committee will be appearing in prime time, holding the first in a series of televised hearings making their case to the American public. Ahead of the hearings, Axios on Wednesday revealed one “blockbuster” witness expected to testify: J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and lawyer who advised Vice President Mike Pence in the leadup to Jan. 6, as Donald Trump was pressuring Pence to use his traditionally ceremonial role as president of the Senate to overturn the 2020 election results. Luttig gave Pence the legal argument he used to defy Trump’s anti-democratic demand; the vice president quoted Luttig in a statement released moments before the joint session of Congress. While official invitations to testify have not been sent to Luttig, according to Axios, the conservative legal scholar is “expected to describe his view of the stakes of Jan. 6 and his argument that American democracy is at a crossroads” before answering questions—including, presumably, ones about the constitutional defense he armed Pence with. Luttig referenced such legal technicalities in April while warning in a CNN Op-Ed that “the last presidential election was a dry run for the next” for Trump and Republicans, who “began readying their failed 2020 plan to overturn the 2024 presidential election” hours after the insurrection and “have been unabashedly readying that plan ever since, in plain view to the American public.” GOP efforts to elect election-denying candidates to state legislative offices in battleground states, as well as Trump supporters to Congress, are among Luttig’s examples. The Luttig news comes as House committee members have promised fireworks at the public hearings, which, according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, “will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House” and “will be compared to the Watergate hearings.” (Perhaps, but Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivanwrote in her latest column why a Watergate moment is unlikely, thanks in part to the right-wing media ecosystem that didn’t exist in the Nixon era.) Back in January—when the select committee was discussing potential hearing formats, including holding them in prime time, to build a maximum audience for testimony—Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chairman, told Bloomberg, "The public needs to know, needs to hear from people under oath about what led up to January 6, and to some degree, what has continued after January 6." Since then, Thompson has said that some of the hearings spread throughout June will be a “mixture of some prime time and some regular,” but aside from a draft recently reported by the Guardian, the schedule remains unclear. (The Jan. 6 committee did not respond to a request for comment.) The upcoming hearings aren’t a trial; the committee is instead making its case in the court of public opinion. Getting coverage in the media, and specifically TV news, can play a significant role in that effort. But one week out, exact plans for coverage are still being ironed out. Presumably, cable news networks, like CNN, will take the hearings live. As for the broadcast networks, which would be preempting regularly scheduled programming, ABC plans to cover the first hearing in primetime, an ABC News spokesperson told Vanity Fair; representatives from NBC and CBS did not provide details on their networks' plans.
Extremally well organized Conspiracy? Civil war? hahhahaah. Liz Chaney is an epic moron. My god Wyoming voters you cant be that stupid.
Civil War with no weapons? Does this guy look like he's ready to go to battle? Liz Cheney please resign out of sheer stupidity.
We hear from pride month's own Vegasdessert there. So breathy. The restrictive D.C. gun laws, requirement to register ammunition and location specific bans is what stopped January 6th from becoming a bloodbath. Politicians affording themselves protection they won't give children.
The January 6 Committee Gets Ready for Prime Time https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/the-january-6-committee-gets-ready-for-prime-time/ The House select committee investigating the January 6 attack is boldly going where congressional committees almost never go: prime time. Next month, the panel is set to hold a week or so of hearings, and to achieve maximum impact, it intends to put on its show in the evening, starting in the 8:00 hour on the East Coast, when there is potential for a large television audience. With this move, the committee could achieve what hasn’t occurred in a long time: a congressional hearing that makes a difference. Blockbuster congressional hearings used to be a fixture in American life. The Army-McCarthy hearings. The Senate Vietnam War hearings (during which a young antiwar vet named John Kerry poignantly remarked, “How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”). The Watergate hearings. Iran-contra. Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill. These and other hearings riveted the nation. (The Thomas-Hill hearings included a dramatic evening session.) Occasionally hearings have made news that has defined issues or yielded significant change. The 1994 hearing that placed in the hot seat the chief executives of the top seven tobacco companies—who each testified that they did not believe cigarettes were addictive—was a landmark moment in the battle against Big Tobacco and corporate malfeasance. Hillary Clinton’s marathon 11-hour appearance before a House Benghazi committee demonstrated that the Republicans’ conspiratorial allegations were baseless. Yet congressional hearings have generally not had the impact they once did. Overall, the quality of these sessions has decreased. There’s usually too much jawboning by senators and representatives who are ill-prepared and interested mostly in producing a soundbite that may or may not be relevant to the subject of the hearing. The sessions can produce viral clips that bring attention to an important subject. (Democratic Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter have demonstrated talent in this regard.) And they can still offer drama, as with the Brett Kavanaugh-Christine Blasey Ford showdown. But often they don’t do much to alter narratives or the world. House Republicans turned the hearings for the first Donald Trump impeachment into a mess, with their constant braying about Deep State plots and conspiracy theories. It was Russian disinformation and other rigamarole designed to distract from Trump’s wrongdoing. And remember the hearing with special counsel Robert Mueller after the release of his report on the Trump-Russia investigation? He was tentative and taciturn and did little to advance the story of Vladimir Putin’s attack on the 2016 election and the Trump crew’s interactions with Moscow operatives. It’s been a while since there was a gangbuster hearing that captured the attention of the public for the right reasons. The January 6 committee is trying to do better. Its members and staff have been thinking about how to stage a hearing that matters. They want to captivate the country and convey the full significance of the insurrectionist assault on Congress that prevented the peaceful transfer of power and that nearly caused a breakdown in the nation’s constitutional order. To that end, they intend to ensure that each nightly installment contains new revelations, information that can generate headlines and command widespread interest—especially in the face of what will be an all-out campaign waged by Trump and his allies to downplay and denigrate the hearings. They also aim to construct compelling and coherent narratives about the different aspects of their multifaceted investigation. The plan is not to only focus on the day of the assault but to show the public the full picture of Trump’s efforts to subvert the election. There’s a lot to probe here: Trump pressuring state officials to improperly overturn election results; fake electors; links between the Trump White House and right-wing agitators; Trump’s attempt to lean on Justice Department officials; the involvement of congressional Republicans in schemes to undermine the vote count; the participation of far-right militias; and more. One committee member, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), has displayed the ability to convey a strong narrative in such a setting. He was the lead House impeachment manager for the second Trump impeachment trial. As he notes in his memoir, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, when he pulled together the team of House managers for that proceeding, he told them, We are not going to get up and make a series of disconnected speeches of great oratory that vanish into thin air. We are going to tell America and the Senate one single, unforgettable story with short, vivid chapters brought to life by you and by video, one spellbinding and appalling narrative about how Donald Trump became obsessed with denying the reality of his defeat and Joe Biden’s victory and then set about using every means in the world, first lawful and nonviolent, then unlawful and criminal, and then, finally, violent and criminal, to overthrow the lawful presidential result and replace it what he called his “continuation in office.” And Raskin achieved that. The case he and his team presented in the Senate was well-crafted and engaging, featuring gripping and upsetting video that had not been previously seen. They managed to win 57 votes for conviction, including seven Republicans, racking up the first bipartisan conviction majority in an impeachment trial—though it fell ten votes shy of the two-thirds vote required for conviction. Raskin showed that legislators could apply a sense of showmanship and news to a well-constructed presentation. The January 6 committee will not be seeking to win a legal argument, though at the end of its deliberations it could well recommend prosecutions. Its main task is to inform the public, create a historical record, and to highlight the threat to democracy that has not yet been eradicated. But the committee has a better chance of accomplishing this mission, if it can present forceful storytelling with a dash of pizzazz. With all hearings, a key component is witnesses. John Dean, the Nixon White House insider who spilled the beans, became the star of the Watergate hearings. The committee has yet to release a list, and we do know that a great many of the key participants have not been cooperating with the panel. The public deserves to hear the testimony of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Vice President Mike Pence, Trump attorney John Eastman, crazy-man lawyer Rudy Giuliani, Ivanka Trump, and others, including the former guy himself. But crucial players are resisting, and the Justice Department has not been rapidly pursuing cases against those cited for contempt. On Thursday, the committee took the unprecedented step of subpoenaing five House Republicans: Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs. Each had been asked to provide voluntary testimony about their involvement in Trump’s Big Lie schemes and had told the committee to get lost. It’s unclear what will happen when they resist the subpoenas, but they won’t be testifying at the hearings. Committee members and staffers have been saying that they have been surprised by the amount of material their investigation has gathered, including documents and testimony. That suggests there could be surprises at the hearings in terms of witnesses and revelations. Will there be witnesses who saw Trump’s actions on January 6? That could be must-see television. In all societies, the fight to document history is a crucial endeavor. This is especially so in the face of creeping authoritarianism. Autocrats strive to control the narratives of the past and present to gain and preserve power. Trump and his gang want to diminish the January 6 assault and his attacks on constitutional government to remove the stench that hangs on the GOP and to clear the path for a possible Trump restoration. If they could, they would airbrush all this out of the picture. GOP leaders refused to support the establishment of a bipartisan commission to investigate January 6, which led House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to wisely set up a committee that would not include obstructionist Republicans eager to turn its proceedings into a shitshow. (The two Republicans on the committee are Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who have broken with the Trump cult.) The committee’s job is to provide the public a full accounting of Trump’s attempted coup and the resulting raid on the Capitol. The early signs are that it could well present a powerful and troubling story. After that, it will be up to the American public to decide what to do with this tale.
liz cheney is a true historian, she puts, 11 states, ready to succeed from the union on par with orange real estate developer from new york wanting 4 more years.
FFS man, how many asshole enlarging poppers are you on at this time of the morning? I guess its true that there are no clocks in Vegas.