Quinta Jurecic writes:

The open hearing last week of the committee investigating the January 6 coup attempt plunged viewers back into the brutality and terror of that day. The committee featured footage of insurrectionists beating the law-enforcement officers who attempted to stop them from entering the Capitol, material disturbing enough that YouTube later labeled video of the hearing as “inappropriate for some users.” Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer who testified about her injuries at the hands of the rioters, described “slipping in people’s blood.” Within the chamber, lawmakers who had escaped the violence watched the proceedings with tears in their eyes.

The second hearing, yesterday morning, was free from portrayals of violence but no less gripping. Using a combination of live witnesses and video footage from taped depositions, committee members walked through the evidence that President Donald Trump and his campaign knew the Big Lie about election fraud to be exactly that—yet continued to pursue these claims of a stolen election in the run-up to the insurrection. The overall impression was, as Trump’s own attorney general William Barr commented, of a man “detached from reality” and willing to use violence to bring his chosen reality into existence.

This is an ugly picture—one sketched with urgency and skill by the committee, in a format that doesn’t usually lend itself to such storytelling. Yet even before the hearings began last Thursday, the press had already begun warning that the committee’s slate of planned hearings would likely matter little. Previewing the proceedings earlier that week, The Washington Post reported that “Democrats aren’t counting on Jan. 6 committee hearings to help them with voters” in the upcoming midterm elections.

Democratic leaders may well be right about this. But regardless of whether the hearings help save the party from a wipeout in the midterms, the committee’s first two sessions have already made a powerful case for why this investigation matters. And there is every reason to think that the committee will continue to build that case in the subsequent hearings planned over the course of this week and next. The terror and violence of the riot, and the former president’s role in goading them on, demanded a political and a moral response—and Congress is providing it. In doing so, the committee is also demonstrating that it has learned some lessons from the failure throughout years of cascading scandals—beginning with the Mueller investigation—to attempt to bring about lasting accountability for Trump. [Continue reading…]

Isaac Chotiner writes:

If the former President is charged, what exactly would the charges be, and how tough would the case be to prosecute? To talk about this, I recently spoke by phone with Barbara McQuade, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School and a former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. (She resigned from her position, which she’d held since 2010, in the early days of the Trump Administration.) During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed why Trump’s mind-set is so important to any criminal case, the arguments he might make to defend himself, and whether the Justice Department is too concerned about the optics of charging a former President.

If a case is made against Trump, what precisely would it be for?

It would require a full investigation to see if you can mount sufficient evidence. And the Justice Department will be the first to tell you that it investigates crimes and not people. But, with that in mind, it seems to me that some potential crimes here are: first, conspiracy to defraud the United States; and, second, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. The first one is more broad. The second one is more specific.

What does that mean, “conspiracy to defraud the United States”?

The statutory citation is Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 371. It is sometimes referred to as the Klein Conspiracy, after a case named United States v. Klein. It is frequently used in cases of tax violations, but what it means is that someone with a fraudulent intent did something to obstruct or impede the official functioning of government. And so, in this instance, it would be something like, Trump and others conspired to defraud the American people and interfere with the proper transfer of Presidential power. And it could be as simple as getting Mike Pence to refuse to certify the vote when he had a duty to do so. Sometimes people think about the big picture, that you have to tie Trump to the physical attack on the Capitol. And that could do it, because that was one way that the certification was obstructed. But it could also simply be his efforts to pressure Mike Pence to refuse to certify the vote. And that would be an obstruction of an official proceeding. [Continue reading…]