new york times broke ground in the collective understanding of what happened on january 6th. the proud boys paramilitary group were part of that crowd storming the capitol that day and donald trump had shouted them out before the election. but the way these groups achieved the grave, remarkable active breaching the capitol, during that long schedule national security, event that s not been fully accounted for. that s what we re going to get into right now. because this was, of course, one of the only days of the year that both houses of have congress have all their members gathered, along with the vice president. many people tend to bring their families as well for that swearing in ceremony. and yet they got in, the very first january 6th hearing broke the news that prior to trump s reilly at the ellipse that day, those proud boys were actually casing the joint. just to be aware, to be advise, there s probably about 300 proud boys, marching eastbound and it s 400 block of i
and hour-long descent to where we are. we now know that donald trump knew what he was asking mike pence to do was illegal. and we are left to wonder about just how much danger donald trump knew mike pence was in when he was sending anti-pence tweets to the smartphones of the trump mob attacking the capitol. by 2:24 pm, the secret service had moved vice president pence from the senate chamber to his office across the hall. the noise from the rioters became audible, at which point we knew they had gotten into the building. then president trump tweeted, mike pence didn t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our constitution, giving states a chance to certify a collective set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. usa demands the truth. bring out pence! the situation was already bad. and so it felt like he was pouring gasoline on the fire by tweeting that. 30 seconds later, rio
lie, it was the big rip-off. the constitution says that the vice president of the united states oversees the process of counting the electoral college votes. today, we are focusing on president trump s relentless efforts to pressure mike pence to refuse to count electoral votes on january 6th. i remember hearing the word wimp, he called him a win, and i remember he said, you are a wimp, he will be a win, wimp is the word i remember. a big portion of the hearing today was about how john eastman, trump s lawyer on this issue, actually knew and admitted that this plot here in the president were pursuing was illegal. when mr. eastman came in, he said, i m here to request that you reject the electors. i said, john, if the vice president did what you are asking him to do, we would lose nine to nothing in the supreme court, wouldn t we? i concluded by saying, john, in
reporting on that and the potential accountability for that. but again, as a factual matter, even with all, that it seems remarkable that people who were publicly summoned by trump s call to come to washington would pull this off. they would seem to mostly be strangers. it was odd. well, this evidence is part of the answer, just as these three hearings had shown how the violence was directed and ran parallel to the illegal coup plot, which built on trump s public call it a presidential debate, infamously telling proud boys to stand by. the committee, separately showing how that, which was heard by hundreds of millions of, when you look at the tv ratings of those debates and how they played online around the world it helped the group energize and mobilize more people. it s also [inaudible] because trump and some of his coup plotters originally open about some of the parts in the plot about stealing the election. trump tried to order pence to
happen again and i think that his warning was important because in addition to being concerned about a potential criminal prosecution, we need to be concerned about making sure that, for example, we would form the electoral count act, and we would build our institutions so that we never have anything that close to overturning our democracy again. when you look at the example of that local level, does it show that when both the courts and local or state law enforcement take this seriously, there is a deterrent, there is a correct? i think so, but of course, we saw just earlier today, donald trump talking about pardons. and i think the reason he s doing that is he wants to incentifies people to put themselves on that limb, take the chance for authoritarianism, because frankly, i think prosecution does deter, particularly in cases like this one. when you look at the hearing