We Are Not a Lawyer

WNYC's Brian Lehrer on the radio yesterday morning, previewing the hearing, reminding us as a "devil's advocate" that Trump asked his audience in the Ellipse speech "to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard" in their march on the Capitol, so maybe his intentions weren't violent at all, and I felt I needed to send him a tweet, as I do from time to time:

@brianlehrer the "peacefully and patriotically" line was probably written by Stephen Miller--trademark alliteration. The "fight like hell" language was Trump's own improvisation.

— Woke Mob For Constitutional Right to Choose (@Yastreblyansky) July 12, 2022

Well, Brian never responds to my tweets anyway, but I got something better than that in the afternoon; a fairly vivid account of how my speculation was exactly right, featuring Miller himself, on videotape, telling the January Six committee how he drafted the speech, with Trump demanding the insertion of denunciations of Vice President Pence, and Miller trying to pull them back out on the advice of counsel, in Rep. Stephanie Murphy's retelling:

Following his call with Mr. Miller [on the morning of the sixth], President Trump inserted for the first time a line in his speech that said, quote, "and we will see whether Mike Pence enters history as a truly great and courageous leader. All he has to do is refer the illegally submitted electoral votes back to the states that were given false and fraudulent information where they want to recertify"....

But not everyone wanted these lines regarding the Vice President included in the President's speech, including White House lawyer, Eric Hirschmann....

Eventually Miller thought he had won, but  on the morning of the sixth after a last Trump call with Pence (whom he was calling a "wimp" and a "pussy"), the president reinstated the words, and when he delivered the speech, he did more:

The President did go on stage and then he gave the speech that he wanted to give. It included the formal changes he had requested the night before and in that morning. But also many important last minute adlib changes. A single scripted reference in the speech to Mike Pence became eight. A single scripted reference to rally goers marching to the Capitol became four.

With President Trump adlibbing that he would be joining the protesters at the Capitol. Added throughout his speech were references to fighting and the need for people to have courage and to be strong. The word peacefully was in the staff written script and used only once...

So I really had it all, and I'm really impressed with myself, narratologically speaking.

Our good friend Boswood isn't too impressed with hearing no. 7, apart from the bits I called— 

@Yastreblyansky, @DemFromCT @KagroX @rch371
I was a underwhelmed today. More evidence of T's knowledge he was wrong, and filling in the timeline of incitement (speech ad libs). But the Core criminal case was there before today, most critically, (1) the 12/19 "wild" tweet; /1

— Woke Mob Against Gun Death (@Bosengood) July 12, 2022

—but I think he's wrong in a specifically lawyerly way on this one, in that the criminal case, the case you'd argue in court, isn't the case they need to be arguing.

In fact that was the thing I'd been afraid they'd do, and I'm delighted to see they're not doing it. It's what Robert Mueller did with the report on the Russian work on behalf of the Trump campaign and Trump's attempts to conceal his involvement in 2019, a perfect prosecutorial package delivered to a Justice Department that was determined to protect the perpetrator; and the 2020 first impeachment on Trump's attempt to extort campaign help from the Ukrainian government, a perfect prosecutorial package delivered to the stacked jury of a Republican Senate. 

What these and the second impeachment failed to do was to deliver the stories to the American public, in such a way that it could grasp the awfulness of what had happened. We Are Not a Lawyer! What we need is some narratology, and I think the Select Committee is delivering that, in a much superior way that keeps getting better and better.

Epic, in fact, in the way it's capturing the sweep of the story, with all the little people dragged into it, from minor White House staffers to election workers and Oathkeeper followers, and the timing, with the opening episode starting it off in medias res on January 6 and subsequent episodes offering varying backstories culminating yesterday with that equally concentrated account of December 18-19, the personalities clashing in the "unhinged meeting", the farcical effort to turn Flynn's shyster attorney Sydney Powell into a special counsel (as usual Trump didn't understand that paperwork might be involved), Hutchinson's marvelous picture of Meadows and Giuliani toddling away from the White House, and Trump, left in solitude, unleashing the process that would lead to the last battle with the "will be wild" tweet.

I was also relieved to see not only Giuliani and Meadows, but also Flynn, Jones, Alexander, and Roger Stone finally coming into focus as the lieutenants who were running the show on Trump's behalf from the Willard "war rooms". It looks as if Meadows's refusal to cooperate may be causing a real obstacle to the development of the standard of proof required for the criminal case, since he's so central to choreographing the interactions between Trump on one side and those guys on the other, but he can't stop the development of the epic, for which all you need is the movements, phone metadata, and observations from the chorus (Cipollone, Hutchinson, etc.). The next episode, in prime time (suggesting it will be in some sense the finale, even if there's more to come), will be returning to January 6 and a focus on Trump—his apparent paralysis throughout the afternoon (when, as I've argued before, he was waiting to be summoned to the Capitol to assume dictatorial command); but I think Giuliani (with Kerik and Eastman in the Willard), Stone (fleeing to Florida), and Meadows (at the White House in the state of paralysis described by Hutchinson) will be back in a big way.

And I hope the whole thing is packaged as a mini-series, suitable for binge watching.