Opinion

Most of the media coverage of this year's first major public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee focused on the visceral horrors of the day, and the committee's firm conviction that this was what Donald Trump wanted to happen. Certainly, the newly released video footage was wrenching, and especially when Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards sat quietly through footage of her own assault at the hands of rioters. The committee also laid out the case that Trump was gleeful about the insurrection and, as Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said, told aides and associates that the rioters "were doing what they should be doing."

That case was presented in a compelling fashion, but for most people who have been following the reporting about what happened — and particularly Trump's role in it — very little of it was new. What was likely the biggest revelation of the night, however, was the central role played by the Proud Boys in the committee's narrative of the events of Jan. 6. Using footage and testimony from documentary filmmaker Nick Quested, the committee presented the case that the right-wing men's group, along with the similarly organized Oath Keepers, functioned as a vanguard that led the way for the rest of the mob, incited by Trump himself, that would storm the Capitol.

Every Republican who’s ever denied, or tried to minimize, the hideously destructive reality of the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, should be required to sit and listen to the testimony of Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards.

And if it takes strapping them into a chair, and propping their eyelids open, “A Clockwork Orange” style, then so be it.

“I have said that any man who attempted by force or unparliamentary disorder to obstruct or interfere with the lawful count of the electoral vote should be lashed to the muzzle of a twelve-pounder gun and fired out of a window.” —General Winfield Scott, 1861

Last night the January 6th Committee’s co-chair Liz Cheney told us that “Representative Scott Perry sought a pardon” along with “multiple other members of Congress” for their participation in the attempted coup, their sedition against the United States of America.

Thursday night's public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee made one thing very clear: Donald Trump is personally in the crosshairs. They are coming for him with receipts, in the form of testimony from some of his closest aides and allies. The committee seems prepared to destroy any pretense that Trump was a casual bystander to the insurrection. In fact, its members are building a case that he actively encouraged it, and that by refusing to take action for many hours that day, he was an actual accomplice.

The committee plans to going to knock down the Big Lie by answering a big legal and moral question: Did Trump know he had lost the election? The answer is clear: Yes, he did. Everyone around him told him so. His former aide and current associate Jason Miller testified that their own number-crunchers told him he had lost. Attorney General Bill Barr told him that spreading the lie that the election was stolen was "bullshit." His own daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified that she believed what Barr said. And we learned all of this from hearing their very own words in videotaped testimony, which made it all the more powerful.

Thursday night's public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee made one thing very clear: Donald Trump is personally in the crosshairs. They are coming for him with receipts, in the form of testimony from some of his closest aides and allies. The committee seems prepared to destroy any pretense that Trump was a casual bystander to the insurrection. In fact, its members are building a case that he actively encouraged it, and that by refusing to take action for many hours that day, he was an actual accomplice.

The committee plans to going to knock down the Big Lie by answering a big legal and moral question: Did Trump know he had lost the election? The answer is clear: Yes, he did. Everyone around him told him so. His former aide and current associate Jason Miller testified that their own number-crunchers told him he had lost. Attorney General Bill Barr told him that spreading the lie that the election was stolen was "bullshit." His own daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified that she believed what Barr said. And we learned all of this from hearing their very own words in videotaped testimony, which made it all the more powerful.

The hearings held in the House last night to investigate the attempted coup on January 6 are vital if we have any hope of holding elected officials accountable – but they are unlikely to change minds.

The truth is the evidence presented at these hearings doesn’t matter. The entire country knows Donald Trump and other Republican politicians were directly involved in trying to overturn a legal election.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle for prosecutors eventually to clear in order to bring criminal charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election will be proving his intent. As we explain in a new report, the Jan. 6 committee hearings that begin this week, together with what we know already, should provide more than enough proof to establish the former president's corrupt mental state as he attempted to overturn the election.

In criminal law, "intent" refers to someone's state of mind at the time of their criminal action. When proving intent, you need to show that they intended to do the thing that is a crime. Because it is rare to have direct evidence of what a person is actually thinking, prosecutors usually infer intent from the facts and circumstances surrounding a person's actions.

Transgender people — especially transgender people of color — have been leading the activist charge toward LGBTQ+ equality since the beginning, literally throwing the first bottles at the Stonewall riots.

And since the beginning, they’ve been the most victimized. They remain so, and Ohio Republicans have devised a savagely creepy, abhorrent way to target and victimize not just trans people, but all female high school and college athletes, by moving legislation with a “verification process” of checking the genitals of those “accused” of being trans.

There was some fear when the Jan. 6 committee convened that it would amount to little more than a partisan tool that could easily be discredited. That’s not how it turned out.

The nine members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, as the House panel is formally known, have been working for almost a year. In that time the committee has developed evidence of a “coordinated, multi-step effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and prevent the transfer of power.”

Much is still unknown about what the House select committee on the Jan. 6 insurrection will roll out Thursday night in the first of a series of summer hearings. Apparently the "no spoilers" culture that dominates Hollywood has made the leap to Capitol Hill. But the basic conclusion of the committee's findings is coming into focus: What happened in that first week of 2021 was the product of a widespread criminal conspiracy that appears to have tendrils throughout the Republican Party and among thousands of Trump supporters.

"We'll demonstrate the multipronged effort to overturn a presidential election, how one strategy to subvert the election led to another, culminating in a violent attack on our democracy," Rep. Adam Schiff of California, one of the Democrats on the committee, told the New York Times.

Sick societies produce sick leaders. Donald Trump's presidency and its aftermath offer perhaps the clearest examples of that fact in recent history. Trumpism, the contemporary Republican Party and "conservative" movement in America seem like a distillation of the worst aspects of human nature in general and American society in particular.

Yet despite an abundance of evidence, America's political elites remain largely in denial about the human, political, social and moral disaster of the Age of Trump and beyond. For the most part, they remain deeply invested in an obsolescent system that is teetering on collapse. Similarly, America's mainstream news media refuses to consistently report on or properly explain the many crises facing the country. As a class, its leading practitioners are also invested in a failing system and its fading myths about "normal" politics and inherent American goodness.

It took Ron DeSantis 11 days to say anything publicly about the mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde (and Tulsa and Ames and Chattanooga and Philadelphia).

Maybe he was too busy disenfranchising Black voters or boasting about how Florida is rolling in money (a lot of it courtesy of Joe Biden) while also vetoing contraception programs for poor women, a food bank in Florida’s poorest zip code, and Everglades restoration funds.

I have been covering San Francisco politics for more than 40 years, and I have never seen a district attorney face anything close to the media assault that came down on Chesa Boudin.

The first DA I covered, Arlo Smith, was marginally competent, but never went after a rogue cop, never did anything about public corruption, and had at best an unimpressive record on convictions. Nobody cared.