Lead House impeachment manager Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), now leading the House Jan. 6 House Committee, hopes his report will “tell a story that will blow the roof off the House,” hoping to use the committee’s findings for pure politics. Raskin was one of the most politically biased House managers during Trump’s 2020 impeachment trail for “inciting an insurrection,” the main impeachment charge that ended Feb. 13, 2020 in acquittal in the U.S. Senate. Democrats, led by Raskin and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), hoped trying Trump a second time for the same crime would prevent him from running for election in 2024. But the real hope is that the Jan. 6 report galvanizes Democrats before the Midterm elections when Democrats risk losing the House and the Senate. Raskin likes to preach to the choir but it remains to be seen how the Jan. 6 report changes anything.
Most U.S. citizens, other than highly partisan elected officials and their friends in the Democrat-controlled press, are over the event. Raskin hopes to show that former President Donald Trump was linked to orchestrating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Democrats call an “insurrection.” Can you imagine, armed with cell phones, not Kalashnikovs or Molotov cocktails, an angry mob vandalized the Capitol Jan. 6, to pay Congress back for allowing months of looting and rioting after the George Floyd’s May 25, 2020 murder by Minneapolis police. Trump was branded by Democrats as a racist, white supremacist, the perfect description, along with a fascist dictator, Russian asset and everything else. Democrats plan to use the Jan. 6 report condemning Trump and his close advisers before the Nov. 3 Midterm elections. Raskin’s hyperbole plays only in the most rancorous partisan circles.
Raskin couldn’t prove in the Senate impeachment trial that Trump had anything to do with planning the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “No president has ever come close to doing what happened in terms of trying to organize and inside coup to overthrow an election and bypass the constitutional order,” Raskin, making the same arguments made during the impeachment trial that ended in failure. “And then also use a violent insurrection made up of domestic violent extremist groups, while nationalist and racist, fascist groups in order to support the coup,” Raskin insisted. Raskin has no more evidence that Trump had anything to do with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot than when he lost in arguments Feb. 13 in the Senate impeachment trial. Partisan Democrats and the Trump-hating media lap up Raskin’s hyperbole, hoping that he can help Biden’s abysmal approval ratings, now hovering less than 41% aggregate.
Raskin makes all kinds of accusations because he’s not required to meet any kind of legal proof. Raskin made a big deal over testimony that Trump inner circle tried to get him to stop the Jan. 6 riot. What Raskin and other Democrats on the Select Committee can’t accept is that Trump didn’t stop the Jan. 6 because he had nothing to do with it. Enough disgruntled White citizens descended on Washington to give elected officials some of their own medicine. White citizens reached the boiling point after Congress let Black rioters, looters, arsonists and anarchists burn American cities down for months over the summer of 2020. Raskin leaps to conclusions that the purpose of the Jan. 6 riot was to stop the Electoral College vote certification. Judging by the kind of misanthropes at the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, it’s obvious their objective was malicious mischief not insurrection.
Raskin, like House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), can’t be trusted for anything other than highly partisan attacks. If you ask Raskin, the country only has white supremacist groups, not Black anarchist groups designed to riot during times of racial unrest. “This was not a coup directed at the president,” Raskin said. “It was a coup directed by the president against the vice president and against Congress,” making statements not supported by facts, dredging up the same old arguments he made during Trump’s impeachment trial. Raskin and his Select Committee colleagues can only tie Trump to orchestrating the Jan. 6 riot by rumor, innuendo and conjecture, not facts. When Trump’s daughter Ivanka said she tried to get her father to stop the riot Jan. 6, she’s not saying he had any role with planning the riot. She saying she didn’t like the events at the Capitol and wanted to stop it.
Raskin said he’d prove that Trump tried to get 62-year-old former Vice President Mike Pence to invalidate the Electoral College vote. Raskin can’t say whether anything was orchestrated by Trump with any outside group, only jumping to the worst conclusions of what Trump wanted Pence to do. Pence did the right thing telling Trump and others that his certification of the Electoral College vote Jan. 6 was purely ceremonial. Trump’s cosmic naivete led him to think his Pence could do much more. That doesn’t prove that Trump had anything but the most gullible expectations of what Pence could do on Jan. 6. However the president’s men-or-women stonewalled the committee that had more to do with Executive Privilege and Article 2 powers, not an attempt to hide anything from the committee. Saying Trump did nothing for hours on Jan. 6 proves he had nothing to do with the rabble rousers.
