Fifty years ago, Watergate gave us some boffo soundbites – my favorite was Charles Colson’s credo: “When you’ve got ’em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow” – but the Nixon scandal can’t hold a candle to our still-unfolding Fascistgate.
Consider the smorgasbord that we dined on yesterday at the Jan. 6 committee’s latest session:
“Fucking asshole, congratulations. You’ve just admitted that your first step you’d take as Attorney General would be committing a felony.” – Sane White House lawyer Eric Herschmann, rebuking Justice Department official Jeff Clark. Clark was the Trump flunky who aspired to be Trump’s Attorney General, despite having no credentials to lead the DOJ. At Trump’s behest, he was jonesing to demand that Georgia throw out Joe Biden’s winning tally. But Herschmann, our leading contender for Guy You Most Want To Have a Beer With, slapped Clark silly.
“How about you go back to your office and we’ll call you when there’s an oil spill?” – Sane Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue, rebuking Clark for his dearth of credentials. Clark was a mid-level environmental lawyer who had never conducted or tried a criminal case, but that was just fine with the criminal-in-chief, who wanted an AG who would aid the coup. Clark weathered Donoghue’s insult, but this week’s insult – having his home raided by the FBI as he stood on the street in his PJs – was surely more embarrassing.
“Just say it (the election) was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.” – Trump’s advice to acting AG Jeffrey Rosen and Donoghue. In other words, the top law enforcement department should simply put its thumb on the scale for Trump’s lies. And hadn’t we heard that kind of thing before? Yes indeed. Trump tried the same stunt with Ukraine President Zelenskyy in 2019, demanding that Zeleneskyy help him out by labeling the Biden family as “corrupt” without a shred of investigatory evidence. I guess Susan Collins was wrong when she said that Trump’s first impeachment would teach him a lesson.
“You guys may not be following the Internet the way I do.” – Trump to Rosen and Donoghue. Spoken like a brain-dead troll living in mommy’s basement. That’s where Trump got it into his head that somebody in Italy was uploading something to an Italian satellite that had magically switched American votes from Trump to Biden. Donoghue called it “pure insanity,” but various high Trump officials were compelled to waste time checking whether it was true. Trump had also harvested fake Internet info to claim in a tweet that “Michigan voting machines” had a “68 percent error rate.” It turned out that the single county he’d targeted had an error rate of .0063 percent.
“Why don’t you guys seize the machines?” – Trump to Rosen and Donoghue. That fascist impulse went nowhere because (a) there was no evidence whatsoever that voting machines were corrupted, and (b) it wasn’t the DOJ’s job to summarily seize machines even if they were corrupted. (If you want to see what happens when voting machines are seized, watch the final scene of HBO’s The Plot Against America.)
“We gotta get going!” – Pennsylvania congressman Scott Perry, in a text to Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows. Perry, one of Trump’s core coup conspirators, was very restless in the final weeks before Biden’s inauguration. He had this crackpot idea that Pennsylvania had racked up a quarter of a million fake votes, thereby negating Biden’s statewide win. Perry later sought a preemptive pardon, just in case he’d done something wrong.
“The only reason to ask for a pardon is because you think you committed a crime.” – Republican congressman and Jan. 6 committee member Adam Kinzinger, referring to the motley coup crew that wanted absolution. Sworn testimony has implicated House members Perry, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Andy Biggs, Mo Brooks…Heck, Brooks even emailed the Trump White House seeking pardons for all 147 members that had refused to certify Biden’s Electoral College victory. If this were a just world, these traitors would be expelled from Congress – the same way three congressmen and 10 senators were ousted in 1861 for having engaged “in a conspiracy against the peace and union of the United States Government” – but that’s too much to ask for.
And lastly, “Our committee has just begun to show America the evidence that we have gathered. There is much more to come.” That’s my personal favorite. We can binge anew in July.