We now know what it takes for former Attorney General Bill Barr and former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to tell the true story of the apparent conspiracy to overturn the election. It takes being put under oath. Don’t let anyone tell you that the Jan 6 committee’s work has made no difference. 

Barr and Cipollone had every opportunity to grab a microphone and tell people there is zero evidence of election fraud and the president is talking about using the military to seize election machines. They didn’t take those opportunities. They didn’t try to protect us. They waited until they were legally forced to tell the full story.

At the beginning of today’s hearing, Cheney rejected Trump World’s efforts to blame folks like John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Rep. Scott Perry for “manipulating” Trump into multiple, persistent efforts to resist a peaceful transfer of power. Cheney noted Trump “cannot escape responsibility by being willfully blind.” By contrast, she reasoned, millions of Americans “did not have access to the truth like Donald Trump did;” instead, “want[ing] to fight for their country,” they trusted him — “and he deceived them.”

That Trump deceived his followers is both irrefutable and tragic. And it is also, at least in the eyes of judges and juries overseeing the Jan. 6 criminal cases, legally irrelevant. Numerous defendants have tried variations on “The president made me do it!” defense, as Politico documented earlier this year, but to the best of my knowledge, none has succeeded in dismissing the charges against them or reducing their sentences on this basis.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee, made the case that there were “three rings of interwoven attack” that converged on Jan. 6 and fueled the insurrection. 

The inside ring: Trump pressuring Pence to “abandon his oath of office” and assert unilateral power to reject electoral votes. 

The middle ring: Domestic extremist groups coordinated a massive effort to storm the U.S. Capitol. “By placing a target on the joint session of Congress, Trump had mobilized these groups around a common goal, emboldening them, strengthening their working relationships and helping build their numbers,” Raskin said.

Outer ring: the angry crowd. Thousands of enraged Trump followers converged in Washington, persuaded by Trump’s “big lie” that Trump was about to be removed from office illegitimately. “With the proper incitement by political leaders, and the proper instigation from the extremists, many members of this crowd could be led to storm the capitol,” Raskin said.

Raskin’s breakdown is clarifying and helpful: It lays the primary blame on the political leaders and extremists who sought to disrupt a peaceful transfer of power, and took advantage of enraged citizens who were not necessarily planning to storm the Capitol but got caught up in the organized efforts of others. Nonetheless, they constituted a critical element of an event that caused a rupture in democratic norms in our country.  

“No sane or rational person would believe that the election was stolen,” or so said Liz Cheney moments ago.  While no one would ever accuse Trump of being even remotely rational, the impulse for Trump’s constant lies about 2020 election are far simpler to explain: He didn’t want to admit that he lost.

It’s hard to remember now but back in 2016 Trump played a similar game. In the third presidential debate with Hillary Clinton, he refused to say that he would concede the election if he lost. He told a campaign rally that he would only accept the results “if I win.”  Before the 2020 election, he regularly claimed that the election could be stolen, in effect, laying the groundwork for him never having to concede defeat. If he won, it was the will of the voters. If he lost, it was stolen. Heads he wins, tails you lose.

For Trump there is no worse and more damning epithet than ”loser” and for him to acknowledge that Biden had defeated him would mean, in effect, conceding that he is a loser too. Trump’s child-like refusal to concede defeat to Biden — and to hold onto the oft-disproven claim that he lost the 2020 election — seems neither rational nor sane. And it’s not. But for Trump he’d much rather appear insane or irrational than ever be called a “loser.”

Here are three things we should be watching for in today’s hearing. 

First, how close did we really come to an even more deadly disaster on Jan. 6? It’s been reported through DOJ filings in their cases against Oath Keepers, that military ordnance, grenades, weapons and bomb-making materials or instructions were found in FBI searches of residences following Jan. 6. Cooperating witnesses have told investigators that such material were stored in places around Washington, D.C., on that day. 

Second, let’s look for evidence that there was planning and coordination across violent domestic extremism groups like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys. We already know that the leaders of those two groups met in a parking garage in D.C. on Jan. 5 — but were there other meetings or planning sessions? That’s important not only because it shows that the Capitol violence wasn’t just a rally that turned into a riot, but a coordinated effort to interfere with our democracy. 

Third, let’s look for the dots to be connected into a more solid line between violent extremists and close associates to Trump. We know, for example, that Oath Keepers served as security for Trump adviser Roger Stone that day. Why? Let’s watch and find out.

Trump World is taking a new tact in response to the effectiveness of the Jan. 6 hearings, committee vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney tells us. The committee has effectively demonstrated that. many of Trump’s senior advisors repeatedly told him the election was not stolen, and thus the defense strategy has shifted. Now, Team Trump is attempting to blame those outside of the administration for “poorly advising” the former president. 

But Cheney also made clear that Trump cannot use poor advice as an excuse. And she reminded us that Trump, perhaps more than any other American, had more access to detailed information showing that the election was not in fact stolen. 

Cheney explicitly leaves us with two options. Trump is either irrational and insane or knew exactly what he was doing. “No rational or sane man in his position could disregard the evidence,” she notes. So which is it? 

In the lead-up to today’s hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin has pledged to show America the “convergence” of “two streams of activity”: the “political coup” that Trump and his enablers efforted and the “insurrectionary mob violence” orchestrated by groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in support of that coup attempt.

Thanks to Raskin, we know that one focus today will be the connection between two mid-December 2020 events. The first is an infamous White House meeting on Dec. 18, 2020. And the other is Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet the next day: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

But as your resident recovering litigator, I’m watching to see if the committee can deliver on two other, potential connections.

That Trump allies Mike Flynn and Roger Stone associated with the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys respectively is well documented. What’s less understood, however, is whether Trump’s instruction to Meadows to call Flynn and Stone on the evening of Jan. 5 — as Cassidy Hutchinson testified — has anything to do with those men’s militia ties. Indeed, Hutchinson did not know why Trump pressed Meadows to make that call nor what was discussed.

I’m also curious what the committee knows about Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes’ attempts to reach Trump and his inner circle and who his intermediaries were. 

As NBC News reported yesterday, the Oath Keepers’ general counsel, Kellye SoRelle, has told the Jan. 6 committee that as a volunteer for Lawyers for Trump, she was in contact with Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell’s teams, and Rhodes pressed her to put him in touch with the White House. More ominously, when William Wilson, another Oath Keeper charged in the Jan. 6 criminal investigation, pleaded guilty in May, he revealed that he heard Rhodes talk by speakerphone with an unnamed individual.

Wilson said he heard “Rhodes repeatedly implore the individual to tell President Trump to call upon groups like the Oath Keepers to forcibly oppose the transfer of power,” according to court records.

Although that unnamed person reportedly “denied Rhodes’s request to speak directly with President Trump,” was he or she capable of making that connection? And does the committee know who that person is?

The committee is expected to focus in part today on a White House meeting of Trump allies that took place on Dec. 18, 2020. Attendees included pro-Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, former national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne. (NBC News reported today that Byrne will meet with congressional investigators on Friday.)

The gathering reportedly focused on strategies for overturning the election, including potentially seizing voting machines or having Trump appoint Powell as a special counsel to investigate so-called election fraud.

A day later, Trump tweeted to his millions of followers: “Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. ... Be there, will be wild!”