The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack revealed at its inaugural hearing that Donald Trump's top Republican allies in Congress sought pardons after the January 6 insurrection, a revelation that bolsters the claim that the event amounted to a coup and is likely to cause serious scrutiny for those implicated.
One of three revelations portending potentially perilous legal and political moments to come for Trump and his allies was the news that multiple House Republicans asked the Trump White House for pardons.
Trump was at the center of a plot that resulted in a coup.
At the hearing, the panel's vice-chair Liz Cheney named only one Republican member of Congress, congressman Scott Perry, who sought a presidential pardon for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The select committee did not elaborate on which other House Republicans were asking for pardons or more significant, for which crimes they were seeking pardons, but it appeared to show that they knew they had been involved in illegal conduct.
If the Republican members of Congress really were only raising legitimate questions about the election, why would they need a pardon?
Jamie Raskin, a member of the select committee, said it was hard to find a more explicit statement of guilt than looking for a pardon for actions you have just taken.
Willfulness of sight loss.
During the opening hour of the hearing, the panel made the case that Trump could not credibly believe he had won the election after some of his most senior advisors told him he had lost.
According to videos of closed-door depositions played by the select committee, Trump was told by his data experts that his election fraud claims were a lie.
The admissions by some of Trump's top aides are important since they could put federal prosecutors one step closer to being able to charge Trump with obstructing an official proceeding or defrauding the U.S. on the basis of election fraud claims he knew were false.
The legal doctrine of willful blindness is what the panel seems to be trying to make out of the case.
Trump could not use the form that he could not use, as his defense against charges he violated the law to stop Biden's certification, that he believed there was election fraud, when he had been credibly notified it was "bullshit"
Trump and Flynn Powell met.
In the first hour of the hearing, the select committee cast in a new light the contentious 18 December 2020 meeting Trump had at the White House with his former national security advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.
The meeting where Powell urged Trump to sign an executive order to seize voting machines and suspend normal law was extensively reported by The Guardian.
Cheney confirmed the reporting by this newspaper and others that the group discussed "dramatic steps" such as seizing voting machines, but also mentioned the possibility of obstructing Biden's election win certification.
The basis for that characterization is based on how Cheney described the late night meeting in the Oval Office that later continued in the White House residence.
It was not clear whether Cheney was laying the groundwork for the select committee to tie Trump into a conspiracy of some kind, claiming this represented two people entering an agreement and taking overt steps to accomplish it.
Soon after the phrase "wild protest" was used by some of the most prominent far-right political operatives.
Ali Alexander, the leader of the movement, applied for a permit to stage a rally on the east side of the Capitol on January 6, hours after Stop the Steal changed its banner to advertise a protest.
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