January 6 Was Not a Dream

 

Peter Thiel Dreams of Empire, Hanna Barakat + AIxDESIGN & Archival Images of AI / via Dave Karpf, Tech Policy Press, January 2025.

I guess everybody's heard about the weird little present eight Republican senator—Tommy Tuberville (Alabama), Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Ron Johnson (Wisconsin), Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee), Josh Hawley (Missouri) and Dan Sullivan (Alaska)—gave or attempted to give themselves in the continuing resolution that ended the government shutdown last week, inviting them to sue the government for half a million dollars apiece for, I guess, insulting them by suggesting their behavior was suspicious, when the FBI seized their phone records for January 4 to 7 2021, in what was briefly known as the Arctic Frost investigation in 2023.

Or as Josh Hawley said, “Yesterday we learned that the FBI tapped my phone … tapped Lindsey Graham’s phone, tapped Marsha Blackburn’s phone, tapped five other phones of United States senators,” except of course that wasn't true in any way—it was just the metadata for the four days, no wiretaps. And

Biden’s Stasi who claimed to be saving ‘our sacred democracy’ in fact worked overtime to destroy it — all for power. They spied on Catholic churches, prosecuted pro-lifers, deployed the FBI against parents at school board meetings — and tried to tap the phones of their political enemies. Including mine," Hawley wrote on X.

"This is an abuse of power beyond Watergate, beyond J. Edgar Hoover, one that directly strikes at the Constitution, the separation of powers, and the First Amendment."

Obviously none of that was true either. "Biden's Stasi" is the agency that named special prosecutors to investigate Hunter Biden's business dealings and the classified documents retained in Biden's home from his time as vice president, as also Mike Pence's, though it also did issue a memo, rescinded shortly afterwards, expressing concern about hypertraditionalist Latin Mass enthusiasts, after investigating a

suspect [who] expressed neo-Nazi rhetoric and described himself as a "Catholic clerical fascist." The FBI said he wrote in a letter to a family member that he needed to "build guns, explosives, and other forms of weaponry" in order to "make total war against the Satanic occultist government and the Zionist devil worshiping bankers who control it."

Call me paranoid, but I'm with the FBI on that; I don't get a good feeling off people who call themselves "Catholic clerical fascists" either.

In any event, the scandal is already blowing off, in its basic character as an example of senatorial greed; Johnson and Thune will have removed the provision from the legislation before the final votes, and it will be memory-holed before Christmas. But there's an aspect to the case that never got anything like the attention I thought it deserved, which is the reason why the FBI got interested in those eight senators in the first place, which has to do with what they were doing on January 6 2021: essentially serving as the floor lieutenants for defendant Donald Trump and Unindicted Coconspirator no. 1, Rudolf Giuliani (unindicted in federal court, anyway and Michigan, but charged in Georgia and Arizona), in their effort to halt the certification of election results and push the case for their bogus elector slates.

Trump called Tuberville in the afternoon, as the Capitol Police were trying to get the senators away from the oncoming mob—misdialing Mike Lee, who turned his phone over to Tuberville:

the President called newly elected Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama at 2:26 p.m.179 He misdialed, calling Senator Mike Lee of Utah instead, but one passed the phone to the other in short order.180

President Trump wanted to talk objections to the electoral count. But Senator Tuberville—along with every other elected official trapped and surrounded in the building—had other things on his mind.181

“I said, ‘Mr. President, they’ve taken the Vice President out. They want me to get off the phone, I gotta go,’” Senator Tuberville told reporters.182 “‘[W]e’re not doing much work here right now.”

and even after the cops had rescued Vice President Pence and the others and the plot had fallen apart, Giuliani continued to call them well into the evening:

Rudolph Giuliani tried calling numerous Members of Congress in the hour before the joint session resumed, including Rep. Jim Jordan (R–OH) and Senators Marsha Blackburn (R–TN), Tommy Tuberville (R–AL), Bill Hagerty (R–TN), Lindsey Graham (R–SC), Josh Hawley (R–MO), and Ted Cruz (R–TX).547 

We know definitively what Giuliani was up to because he left a voice message for Senator Tuberville—inadvertently on Senator Lee’s phone—recording his request.307 He wanted for “you, our Republican friends to try to just slow it down,” referring to the electoral count, and delay the joint session.308 Here are his own words:

The only strategy we can follow is to object to numerous States and raise issues so that we get ourselves into tomorrow—ideally until the end of tomorrow. So if you could object to every State and, along with a congressman, get a hearing for every State, I know we would delay you a lot, but it would give us the opportunity to get the legislators who are very, very close to pulling their vote.309

Johnson, of course, acted as a personal courier for the Wisconsin fake electors, trying to get the list into Pence's hands. Grassley was, as you'll remember, designated to take over from Pence as Senate president pro tem in the Cheseboro plan:

In a memo of Dec. 13, 2020, Trump lawyer Kenneth Chesebro — who has been indicted alongside Eastman and 17 others, including Trump, in Georgia — floated a detailed scenario in which Pence would recuse himself and Grassley or someone else would take over.

Eastman, in an email of Dec. 23, 2020, to Chesebro and others, referred to not wanting to “constrain Pence (or Grassley) in the exercise of power they have under the 12th Amendment.”

We don't know what Graham did, but we do know he was forced to testify to the grand jury in the Georgia case against Trump. Cruz was engaged in the effort to deny certification, as he told Maria Bartiromo, and declare the election invalid. And so on.

What I'm saying in the first place is that these phone records provided vital evidence (collated with testimony from the Thompson-Cheney House committee) for Jack Smith's indictment of Donald Trump for election obstruction, and in the second place that this Senate mishigas is designed in the White House, along with Trump's own claim for $230 million and the 70-odd pardons of people involved in the fake-elector schemes, some of whom have already pleaded guilty in state courts, to simply obliterate the memory of Trump's worst crime.

Because that's what it's been doing, in effect, in the process that begins with Smith's withdrawing the indictments themselves. It's as if nothing happened at all after the 2020 election, as if it was all a bad dream, even as Trump continues to subvert the Constitution in everything from appropriations to lunatic war plans, and it's making me crazy. That was no dream!