Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) spoke to Jake Tapper on CNN after last night’s January 6 hearing:
TAPPER: Are there going to be witnesses that describe actual conversations between these extremist groups, and anyone in Trump’s orbit?
THOMPSON: Yes.
TAPPER: There will be?
THOMPSON: Yes.
Punchbowl News: “We can’t say right now. But it was plain to anyone watching that the select committee is far from a sham, as Trump and GOP leaders have asserted for months. Its presentation was delivered extraordinarily effectively. Trump and his Republican allies were eviscerated by the testimony and statements from his own former aides and administration officials. Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), the chair and vice chair of the panel, orchestrated a brutal takedown. Cheney’s performance was particularly poignant given how Republicans treated her over the last two years.”
“There’s also a clear plan for this series of hearings during the rest of June. It’s going to be a long few weeks for the House Republican leadership, which has stood unflinchingly behind Trump.”
“Yet the dissonance in the American political system is as loud as it’s ever been, as well. Republicans are charging toward the House majority even as they stand by a former president exposed as supporting a violent attack on American democracy.”
Rep Lauren Boebert (R-CO) “covered up” an off-roading accident that could have sunk her political career after she lost control of Jeep ATV and left her son, dog, and sister-in-law to smash into a rock face two weeks before key 2020 primary, the Daily Mail reports.
David Leonhardt: “There are still many Republican voters disgusted by what happened on Jan. 6. Nearly half say that finding out what happened that day is important. Almost 20 percent consider the attack to have been an attempt to overthrow the government, according to a recent CBS News poll. About 40 percent believe, accurately, that voter fraud was not widespread in the 2020 election.”
“If Republican voters are divided over the attack and Democrats are almost uniformly horrified by it, the politicians making excuses for it remain in the minority. Candidates who base their campaigns on lies about voter fraud — as some are now doing in Arizona, Pennsylvania and elsewhere — will have a harder time winning elections. Future efforts to overturn an election will be less likely to succeed.”
Donald Trump called the 2021 Capitol assault “the greatest movement in the history of our country” in a meandering rant Thursday — hours ahead of a congressional hearing aimed at demonstrating his culpability for the deadly siege, Yahoo News reports.
Said Trump: “January 6th was not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”
The House Select Committee investigation the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 will hold its first public hearing at 8 p.m. ET.
You can watch it live on all major broadcast and cable news networks — except Fox News. Or you can watch the live stream.
What I’ll be watching: Are Expectations Too High for the January 6 Hearings?
Leave your reactions in the comments.
Members of a group of House Democrats known as the Gallery Group — after they were trapped together in the House gallery during the Capitol riot — will attend Thursday’s prime-time, Watergate-style hearing as a group, Axios reports.
ABC News has obtained a video that will be shown at tonight’s hearing of the January 6 committee.
The footage “shows some of the most infamous Capitol rioters in the hours before they appeared in the halls of Congress.”
The committee also plans to “feature clips of taped interviews with Trump administration officials and family members, including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett made $425,000 for a forthcoming book in 2021, the largest payment that any Supreme Court justice received in book deals that year, Insider reports.
“Former President Donald Trump’s political committee is spending $500,000 on a national digital and TV ad painting the Jan. 6 committee as a partisan witch hunt,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Something strange is happening among Senate Republicans when it comes to guns,” Politico reports.
“As bipartisan talks on a gun safety package continue, conservatives are pointedly not trying to derail them. Several, in fact, seem open to supporting a modest deal. And Republicans are considering some ideas that would have been a non-starter just a month ago, particularly more scrutiny of gun buyers’ juvenile records.”
Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos told USA Today that in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection she spoke to former Vice President Mike Pence about the possibility of invoking the 25th Amendment to remove Donald Trump from office, but that Pence “made it very clear that he was not going to go in that direction.”
Aaron Blake: “House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) took to a news conference Thursday to offer a prebuttal of the Jan. 6 committee’s public hearings, which were set to begin Thursday night. He cast the committee as illegitimate and overly political, suggesting the House’s time would be better used on issues such as inflation, gas prices and crime.”
“What he also did, though, was reinforce just how much the chief questions about Jan. 6, 2021 and what preceded it remain largely unanswered — or at least unsettled, thanks to people like McCarthy, who once expressed great interest in them.”
“In the space of 60 seconds, McCarthy was asked five times whether President Biden’s win in the 2020 election was legitimate. Each time, he declined to answer.”
“I think these guys and women broke the law, tried to turn around a result of an election There’s a lot of questions — who’s responsible, who’s involved – I’m not going to make a judgment on that, but I just want you to know that… a lot of Americans are going to see for the first time some of the detail that occurred.”
— President Biden, quoted by The Hill, on the January 6 hearings beginning tonight.
“The Supreme Court said on Thursday that election officials in Pennsylvania may count mailed ballots accompanied by voters’ declarations that were signed but not dated,” the New York Times reports.
“The court’s order came in a tight race for a seat on a state court, but it is likely to affect other contests in the state as well.”
“Congressional Republicans, who could wield powerful gavels next year, say senators and House members are in talks about 2023 investigations — though they stress conversations are informal,” Politico reports.
“Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who is in line to chair the Judiciary Committee if Republicans take the majority next year, told Politico that he’s spoken with Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Ron Johnson (R-WI) and sees investigations as a key area the two chambers could coordinate.”
Said Jordan: “Where you could really work with the Senate — and I’ve had conversations with Senator Paul, Senator Johnson — is you can work with the Senate on the investigations that need to be done.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.