The Devil is in the Details

I admit it.  There was such a massive swirl of information from the document that it’s above my pay grade to make sense of it all.  I do know that since Trump is so upset with it being made public this close to the election, perhaps he shouldn't have kept delaying the trial until the timing got to this point.

No, there isn't going to be a trial of Trump on this evidence before the election.  But it's good and very important to at least have some of the evidence (even redacted) finally out in the public.  It may not make much difference to enough undecided voters to matter (or, to be fair, may), but what's most important about it is that this all -- along with "JD Vance" trying to whitewash the Insurrection at his debate the night before -- brings January 6th back in to focus as a reminder filled with details before the upcoming election.

And what a mound of details. 

As former DOJ prosecutor Andrew Weissman said to Lawrence O’Donnell last evening, “It’s really hard to do highlights, because this is bombshell after bombshell after bombshell.”

Hey, if Andrew Weissman is unable to do highlights, what chance do I have?

That’s why what’s also clear is that with the cable news networks devoting all day to analyzing the 165 pages of material, any full discussion of it would be ridiculously long even by my standards.  Hey, the fact that the documents show that Trump threatened his vice president Mike Pence 71 times, and it got to the point where Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short had to inform the Secret Service (!!) is almost a footnote.  So, I figure the best thing to do is not only go to an expert I admire, but let him do a much more brief summary.

And that would be election lawyer Marc Elias who was a guest on Nicolle Wallace’s show on MSNBC.  And happily, he’s not only able to summarize it, but highlight his importance in just one sentence.

"I think this is a blockbuster document, but one sentence encapsulates it all," he said.  And it’s when the documents show that Donald Trump told his family -- '’It didn't matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.' He knew he lost,” Elias continued. “He put the nation through 60-plus lawsuits. When that failed, he organized an insurrection of the nation's Capitol. This man should not be anywhere near the Oval Office."

Elias also pointed out that Jack Smith took great pains to show that Trump’s efforts had nothing to do with official actions of the presidency (which the recent Supreme Court ruling required for a president to not have immunity).  To do so, Smith’s documents present a meticulous timeline of the actions Trump took that were separate from his White House duties.  Elias explains --

"If you go back to a much more mundane part of the post-election, or at the time seemed mundane, Donald Trump wound up placing a call to the state canvassing board members for Wayne County, Michigan," Elias noted. "It was kind of an odd thing at the time that you had the President of the United States calling two local canvass board members with the RNC chairwoman trying to pressure them not to certify Detroit."

And then, Trump called Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger, pressuring him to find just those 11,780 extra votes.

All this together is what Elias says is so damning.  Being able to use the documents and follow what Trump is doing to overthrow the election.  Material that comes from a range of sources, of course, but most damningly from Grand Jury testimony not only by Republicans, but by Republicans in Trump’s circle.  And from those documents, Elias says --

"We know now he was hands-on in almost every stage of this post-election process for almost everything we are aware of that was done wrong. He is hands-on in trying to pressure Mike Pence. He is hands-on in trying to pressure or to build this January 6th insurrection rally effort. He was involved because he did not want to lose power, and I think a lot of the people around him knew he lost, and others knew he had lost, but were willing to humor him, but was the only one spending 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every moment, trying to figure out a way around leaving office."

My favorite comment of the day came from Fox anchor Neil Cavuto:   In reporting the story, he said, "It was in this newly unsealed court paper we're learning that former President Trump resorted to crime in a bid to cling to power after the 2020 election."

It's surprising but actually impressive that Neil Cavuto on Fox is reporting this.  So, well done to them.  What's humorous, though, is that only on Fox would viewers just now be "learning" that Trump resorted to crime in a bid to cling to power after the 2020 election."