Day 4 of the January 6th Committee Hearing: "I need you to find 11,780 votes" edition
60 days.
For 60 days, Donald Trump frantically tried everything in his power to overturn a free and fair election. With his "kraken" team of over-priced, under-talented lawyers, Trump and his legal lightweights brought 62 lawsuits aimed at proving there to be widespread voting fraud and irregularities in the states of Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Nevada and managed to lose all but one of them with the one victory not altering a single vote. The January 6th Committee showed that high-ranking administration officials told Trump that his efforts were fruitless and yet, he sauntered on thanks to sycophants like Rudy Giuliani being firmly in his corner. Anybody who was anybody in the conservative legal world told Trump to let it go. But Trump, who's never been told no in his entire life, continued on with January 6th being the culmination of his two-month effort to remain in power and to move American toward a permanent autocracy.
He failed, but not for a lack of trying.
And today, Tuesday, June 21st we will hear exactly what he tried, specifically when it comes to the states of Arizona and Georgia, two states Trump desperately needed in his reelection bid and the two states that had the smallest margin of victory for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election. These two states flipped from 2016, and Trump, the malignant narcissist that he is, could not fathom how he could be more unpopular than he had been four years prior. And yet, he lost, fair and square. Arizona reaffirmed its election results first on November 15, 2020 and then again on January 5, 2021. It even had the GOP-backed Cyber Ninjas, a team of partisan, non-professional ballot counters try to swing public opinion but even they couldn't find one shred of evidence of widespread voter fraud. If the Trump campaign truly wanted to know why Trump lost, they should have looked no further than the state's Native American vote, which thanks to voters on the Hopi and Navajo reservations helped push Biden over the top by increasing statewide Native American turnout by over 20,000 votes compared to 2016. Maybe, just maybe, Trump should have not continuously referred to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas all those times.
But while Arizona stung, especially on election night when it was called early on by Fox News, no state hit Trump harder than losing Georgia, the first Republican to do so since Jimmy Carter. This was a massive blow to his ego and was the one that more than likely drove Trump to criminality. In a now infamous taped call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, Trump urged him to "find" 11,780 votes, the exact number he would need to win the state. Trump's actions to illegally influence Raffensperger, as well of those of Lindsey Graham, are now the subject of a grand jury investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, an investigation that Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman has called the strongest case out there that could send Donald Trump to prison. The January 6th Committee knows just how important this is to the overall plot that led to the insurrection and they have wisely chosen to have Raffensperger himself testify at today's hearing.
The big question we're looking at is how and why the January 6th insurrection happened. Donald Trump not being able to accept his loss is a huge part of that. For 60 days, he tried anything and everything to sow seeds of doubt as to the legitimacy of the election. His actions in states like Georgia and Arizona are the last desperate attempts of a man who was running out of legal options to stay in power. And as history has shown when a wannabe dictator runs out of legal options, he resorts to violence and calls his people to action to fight for him for their last dying breath. Today's hearing is the penultimate stage prior to Trump going all in on January 6th and it once again should be must-see TV.
This is your Day 4 of the January 6th Committee hearings open thread, with the hearing scheduled to begin at 1 PM EST.