The Tangled Web To Take Down Trump

Donald Trump has de facto secured the Republican presidential nomination for the election in November. He has done this facing a storm of open hostility from his political adversaries. Much of that hostility has been centered around the report from the January 6th Congressional committee, which purported to find evidence of Trump inciting an insurrection after the 2020 election. 

From that committee to increasingly absurd court cases against the former president, the political establishment has been doing everything it could—or dared—to keep Trump from making a presidential comeback.

They launched a coordinated, neocon-driven campaign ahead of the Republican primaries to field a never-Trump candidate. Meanwhile, the clearly coordinated legal cases against Trump in New York, Washington, DC, Florida, and Georgia, have been cheered on by a media smear machine. I am not going to dignify their vilification of Trump with any examples; suffice it to say that since they started in 2016, they have had a good eight years to discredit themselves. 

To be clear, I am no fan of Trump. Over the past couple of years, he has been publicly vocal about how he has been wronged since November 2020. He may or may not be correct; my worry has been that as president, he would continue to look in the rearview mirror rather than keep his eyes on the road to America’s future. I have been concerned he would be consumed by getting even with those who have done him wrong. 

Partly for this reason, I supported another candidate in the Republican primaries.

With that said, though, it is becoming difficult to blame Trump for wanting to respond to what he has been on the receiving end of. The more we see of the political machine that has been trying to stop him from winning in November, the more questions arise about those who drive that machine.

One name in particular comes to mind: Republican renegade Liz Cheney.

The January 6th Committee, which she co-chaired with Congressman Bennie Johnson, a Mississippi Democrat, was officially set up to investigate the incursion into Capitol Hill by a large crowd of people on January 6th, 2021. It was also going to investigate Trump’s role in that incursion. 

At least that was the official story. In reality, the purpose of the committee was to tag Trump as an insurrectionist who tried to violently overturn a legal election. That would preclude him from running for a second term as president.

Initially, Liz Cheney’s committee seemed to work for this very purpose. It presented its final report, damning Trump and confidently declaring that there was irrefutable evidence of an insurrection attempt. Therefore, Trump should be disqualified from ever again holding the office of the presidency. 

More than any of the J6 committee members, Liz Cheney went out and about and dispensed these talking points—she even wrote a book about it—with such confidence and persistence that it was easy to believe her.

Then the wheels started coming off the J6 wagon. In 2022, the Republicans took back the majority in the House of Representatives and started investigating the Cheney-Johnson committee. As I explained a year ago (emphasis added):

For two years, the public story about the events at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, has been centered around the word ‘insurrection.’ We have been told that a crazy mob, egged on by former president Donald Trump, tried to overthrow the very democratic system of government here in America. That official story is now dead.

Upon initiative by then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, a total of 41,000 hours of video surveillance from Capitol Hill on January 6th, 2021, was released to the public. This material had been suppressed by the J6 Committee—for one reason only: it convincingly showed that there was no insurrection. 

There were people trespassing on Capitol Hill, there were some cases of theft and a few isolated instances of vandalism recorded, but there was no insurrection. Most people who entered the Capitol walked around like curious tourists, in awe at being so close to an institution of government that they fundamentally respected, even held in reverence.

Since then, the House Oversight Committee, which investigates how the J6 committee conducted its work, has found more instances of allegedly suppressed, even destroyed evidence. Back in August, Breitbart reported:

The January 6 Committee defied a demand [in 2022] by incoming Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) that it preserve all of its records, evidence, and transcripts, and has destroyed much of what it collected over more than a year of investigation.

The degree of document destruction apparently reached such a level that, according to a Breitbart report from March 14th, 

House Oversight Committee chairman Rep. Barry Loudermilk (R-GA) said Wednesday that he may refer members of the January 6 Committee to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution for hiding and destroying documents. 

There is absolutely no chance that the Department of Justice under President Biden would go ahead with any such prosecution. However, if the evidence is as damning as Loudermilk implies, and if Trump wins the November election, the probability of a prosecution is about 100%. If this happens, the two chairpersons of the J6 committee would soon find the tables turned on them. 

This would be especially problematic for Liz Cheney, who is emerging as the spider in a tangled web nefariously woven to take down Trump. 

Not only did Cheney co-chair the J6 committee, but she also seems to have been coordinating her work on the committee with Fani Willis, the prosecutor who is trying to get Donald Trump convicted of an attempt to steal the 2020 election. 

Technically, Willis is the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which limits her prosecutorial jurisdiction to that county. In reality, however, she has launched a barrage of 35 indictments against Trump and 18 ‘co-conspirators,’ one of them being former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani. Willis alleges, among other things, that Trump tried to talk high state officials in Georgia into finding a way to turn the 2020 Georgia election result from Biden to him.

Given the dignity of Fani Willis’s accusations against Trump et consortes—accusations that have yet to be proven—the district attorney has effectively elevated her case against Trump to the national level. Unfortunately for Willis, this has also attracted attention to herself. She is now herself the target of legal allegations: it turns out that she was having an affair with another prosecutor, whom she subsequently hired to work on her anti-Trump team. 

This impropriety led the judge in the case against Trump to order Willis to either fire her former lover or step down from the case herself. She chose the former.

According to The Gateway Pundit, which has examined in detail the March 11th “initial findings” report from the House Oversight Committee, Fani Willis was in close contact with Liz Cheney. There is evidence, the Pundit explains, that Willis “met with” and “participated in numerous calls with” the J6 committee.

On page 50, the March 11th Oversight Committee report summarizes its findings on the Willis-Cheney connection:

[The] prospect of the [January 6] Select Committee sharing video recordings of witness interviews with Willis but not this [Oversight] Subcommittee remains particularly concerning. The Subcommittee has opened an investigation into the extent of the coordination between Willis and the [January 6] Select Committee and is committed to uncovering answers to these questions.

The collusion between Willis and Cheney’s committee is now the target of an investigation by the House of Representatives. 

To make a long story short, the wheels are now coming off the J6 committee wagon. It is a mixed experience to watch this happen: 

• On the one hand, the committee members, and especially Liz Cheney, should face the consequences for their efforts to cast Trump as an insurrectionist while suppressing exculpatory evidence; 
• On the other hand, it is downright painful to watch the J6 members as well as prosecutors in several states and their media allies elevate themselves above the functions of the very constitutional government they claim to be protecting. 

The last point is crucial. Now that we know that the J6 committee colluded with Fani Willis on her case against Trump in Georgia, it would be almost criminally naive to not assume that its members also colluded with New York State Attorney General Letitia James in her lawsuit against Trump for allegedly misrepresenting property values on credit applications. 

Since no bank with which Trump did business has complained about those property values, this case was clearly politically motivated.

We should also assume that the J6 committee coordinated with the prosecutors in Florida who have charged Trump with improper handling of classified documents. Likewise, it is basically a given that the committee has been in close contact with special counsel Jack Smith, who is trying to get Donald Trump convicted of insurrection in a court in Washington, DC. His case is essentially a direct extension of the committee’s work.

As more evidence emerges, the real purpose of the January 6th Committee becomes clear: it served as the hub in a web of politically motivated legal activities to take down Trump. Spearheaded by Liz Cheney, the committee appears to have actively and systematically suppressed exculpatory evidence. It also tried to conceal its cooperation with one of the legal cases against Trump.

With every new piece of information that surfaces, the J6 committee loses more of its integrity. The argument that Liz Cheney and her colleagues on the committee did their due diligence impartially and dispassionately has now lost all its steam. In its place, suspicions arise that Cheney and her committee members one way or another coordinated their work with the prosecutors in New York, Washington, DC, Georgia, and Florida. 

For what purpose? To take down Trump. But why would Liz Cheney be so adamant about doing it?

For the love of God and country?

The answer to this question lies in the emerging picture of a sordid attempt by a political power machine to use—and abuse—the institutions of government against a presidential candidate. 

We should be careful not to rush to conclusions here, i.e., we should avoid falling for the same temptation as Liz Cheney has done. We should avoid unwarranted conclusions based on insufficient evidence. 

At the same time, the picture we already have of Cheney’s work on the J6 committee is damning enough that the burden of moral evidence is now on her shoulders.

Up until the March 11th report from the House Oversight Committee, it was still possible for Cheney to claim, with default credibility, that her committee had for the most part done its due diligence. However, with the evidence now available, the moral default setting has flipped. It is now up to Cheney to prove that her ethical compass was pointing in the right direction when she was serving on the J6 committee. 

If she can’t do that, we can legitimately suggest that she had no other ambitions with the J6 committee than to use it as a launching pad for her own presidential ambitions. 

Cheney has numerous times hinted at a campaign, but never formally announced. She still has time to do that, but that time is running out. Meanwhile, the legal cases against Trump have run into hurdles, with the prospect currently being that Trump may either beat the charges or run out the clock, be elected president, and, in the unlikely case that he is found guilty somewhere, attempt to pardon himself.

Legal scholars disagree on whether or not the law would allow him to do so. If he attempted to, Trump would set in motion an unprecedented constitutional case through the courts. However, that would not change the fact that the machine that emanated from the J6 committee to prevent Trump from a White House comeback is looking more and more like an attempt by Liz Cheney to pave the way for her own presidential run. I am reluctant to draw that conclusion; the Liz Cheney I got to know more than a decade ago when she first entered into politics, was an upfront, honest, and ethical person. 

At the same time, given what has been revealed thus far about the J6 committee and court cases against Trump, Liz Cheney’s moral credit score is dropping precipitously. 

How much more of this can she take before she has discredited herself as a raw, power-addicted politician?