1:35 AQUILAR and staff counsel John WOOD [Luttig law clerk] Questions
1:40 Luttig “respectfully” disagrees w/ JACOB about the one “inartfully written” sentence in the Constitution. That statement was CLEAR.

3:17 JACOB to PENCE email: We are now under siege
EASTMAN response

3:19 Did Eastman call you after reconvened session? Yes.

So DOJ wrote to the select committee yesterday saying the committee is hampering criminal investigations by their “failure” to provide witness transcripts.

People act like this is a falling out. Maybe it is good for the rule of law for the Dept. of Justice to say in a strong and forceful way they have NOT been coordinating investigations with the House Committee, which is what this is. They have been not coordinating, because those witness transcripts were generated for legislative purposes, but it turns out, looking at the evidence set, they do have a prosecutorial purpose.

This was always going to be delicate, the shift from developing the history of what happened to referral for prosecution. The transformation into prosecutor’s evidence is better as a pull from DOJ than as a push from the House.

Bit off topic but figured OK as lots of comments above. This article on the film shown on the Elipse fascinated me.

https://www.justsecurity.org/74504/movie-at-the-ellipse-a-study-in-fascist-propaganda/

Assumed typical Bannon propaganda film, but wondered if the money and “deep” thinkers behind it have been ID’d. Strange times indeed.

In this hearing, I think we may have learned that it is unlikely that Ivanka would participate in any future Trump campaign or administration. If you look at the segment between the 2:02:00 mark and the 2:02:44 mark, there is one particular comment that slips by quickly. It’s a discussion about the call Trump had with Pence in the early morning of 1/6/21.

Herschmann, Ivanka, and Julie Radford are interviewed about Ivanka’s reaction to this call. And a male voiceover (maybe one of the staff lawyers?) makes a statement about one particular comment of Ivanka’s. He says she said something to the effect of, “I made the wrong decision 4 or 5 years ago.”

This sounds like she’s saying she should not have encouraged Donald to run for President and she should not have worked in the White House.

The tone of the voices in this hearing is difficult to listen to. So many of the people (both interviewees and staff doing the interviews) are clearly very depressed. Eastman, however, sounds defiant. And Herschmann is angry.

Just made a small donation to help keep it coming, though “it” is often at least a little over my head (with expertise elsewhere).

I find the Jan 6th hearings useful, though I’m aware of most of the info. I appreciate much of the constructive & sharp commentary. Thanks specifically to Rayne and emptywheel for making it happen.

(Hope I’m not bein’ redundant here. Read all the comments, but worried I still might just be repeatin’. )

At the 5hr mark in her Twitter feed today, Marcy remarked:

“Trump dictating a false statement about Pence’s belief is pretty crimey.

I mean, even by his standards.”

I replied to her tweet some time after, and now say the same here, that I think she hit on the key point of today’s hearing. Aguilar had just presented in great detail all of the meetings and conversations held Jan 4 and Jan 5 between trump (with Eastman with him) and Pence (w Jacob and Short). Both of Pence’s guys repeatedly testified that Pence was completely firm with trump that Pence did NOT have the authority to do either of Eastman’s proposals (that on Jan 6, Pence could either suspend the counting session or reject some disputed states’ electors). Pence’s guys had said either was illegal, and at some point got Eastman to agree. They both repeated to the committee (Short via video deposition, Jacob in person today) that Pence was very clear to trump that Pence did not have this authority, and therefore he would not do either. This went on for a while, covering meetings held both days.
Once Aguilar had drilled all this in, he then posted a short, official presidential communique from trump, issued late on 1/5 or early 1/6, after all these meetings, to the effect that “I (trump) and Vice President Pence are in total agreement that he has the authority to reject / return electoral votes”. (Sorry I don’t have the exact wording, but it was a very short statement and just this precise.) This seems quite crimey to me, too.

My impression of what the J6 committee is trying to do with these hearings is to structure and summarize the findings of their enormous investigation for presentation to the general public via the medium of television. Presumably to keep the audience engaged they have included a limited number of “hot” elements of live witnesses making statements and responding to a few canned questions from the panel to breakup all the “cool” video clips that sample and montage the physical and testimonial evidence they have processed. I think this has been pretty effective so far in building up a coherent image of a concrete plan to overturn the result of the election in the interest of and with the participation of Donald Trump.

bmaz has called the hearing “truncated garbage” among other disdainful things that indicate that he believes we would be better served by some other form for the hearings. Though we are now stuck with the hearings we have, I still would like to know what bmaz thinks would be a better proceeding and what purpose that proceeding should be serving.

Now I got a lot of planting to still do, so I will leave you with what my lawyer brother quoted yesterday as we were texting through the hearing, ” We have only one story. All novels, all poetry, are built on the neverending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue is immortal. Vice has always, a new fresh young face, while virtue is venerable as nothing else in the world is.” John Steinbeck.

People (here and elsewhere) keep tossing around the hypothesis that Judge Luttig had suffered a stroke. So far anyway, all of the reporters who’ve looked into it say no. There is no evidence of his having had a stroke or other serious condition.

While I am not that much of an expert, I do have a background in clinical neuropsychology. And having watched his testimony, I did not see anything that looked like the aftermath of a stroke. If a stroke affects speech it is generally going to be in one of two ways. You may see disruption of language itself (aphasia). If expressive language is damaged, the person will have difficulty (at a minimum) with word-finding – especially low-frequency nouns – and will tend to speak in a kind of “telegraphic” style, with brief/unelaborated statements. That is not at all what we were treated to. His statements were richly developed, with complex periods unfolding in multiple clauses. Nothing like Broca’s aphasia. Alternatively, a stroke may damage motor control of the speech system while sparing language. In such cases speech has a quality known as dysarthria: the words are there, but the delivery is tortured – pronunciation is poor, there is a visible struggle to make the lips, tongue, throat do as one desires, etc. Again, that it nothing like what we saw. He enunciated with perfect clarity.

What we saw was primarily a slow delivery: prolonged latencies before speaking, words being spoken deliberately, and pauses between clauses. You could get this in certain clinical conditions, such as severe depression or possibly Parkinsonism. But it doesn’t seem likely to reflect the aftermath of an emergency situation like a stroke or TBI. Quite possibly he was simply feeling the historic gravity/pressure of the moment (compounded by the fact that he was attacking people he formerly supported and whose political positions he often espouses, which has to be psychologically difficult) and was taking great care in choosing his words, knowing that they would be parsed and critiqued widely – possibly for months or years to come.

The observation by bmaz that he seemed much older and sicker than a few years ago would add to the likelihood that he would be careful, methodical, unlikely to plunge in with half-baked assertions. Some cognitive slowing is likely. But the man’s higher cognitive processes were pretty obviously intact.

Ready to be corrected by any board-certified neuropsychologist or neurologist out there.

PS.

i really do like a well place “whut!’

As Sam Seder and Heather Parton said on https://majorityreportradio.com/2022/06/17/6-17-casual-friday-w-heather-digby-parton-jason-myles
starting at about 22:00, Pence was no hero.
He consulted with:
*Quayle (a fellow con). How many more cons do you need to consult if one tells you no?
*Luttig (left Boeing just after 737max crashes after he was “managing legal matters associated with the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 accidents”).
*who knows who else.
*with Eastman he spent lots of time on the 5th (eve of the insurrection) trying to figure out how he could do what tfg wanted him to and when others said no; if he cared, why would Pence have seen Eastman or not thrown him out?

Hopefully some Dem has the guts to call it out and quit making these creeps “heroes”.
Luttig was no doubt watching his words, because he as well, was probably hunting high and lo to figure out with Pence how they could do it, and he’s no different than Ginni but smarter and thinking every word twice so as not to slip up and show to what extent he wanted to find a way.
They’re all cons and need to be so designated.