are we a banana republic? what has it come to? u.s. citizens let me tell you what it s come to. false. and i ask you, right to say fal to lie in public, when those lies are put on paper and try to override an election, they become fraud. your reaction and what you think the committee should be doing? i m very happy that trump s right-hand man stephen miller decided to testify. i think that s great. we don t know what he s going to testify to. is it just going to be the public statements where he has already admitted to election fraud? is he going to say more about trump s state of mind during the attacks on the capitol? or is he going to stonewall the committee while appearing forever the subpoena and take the fifth all the time? you have to remember stephen miller started off stonewalling,
being unwilling to tell the truth to the committee. now he is going in after some of his friends have popped contempt charges but we don t know that he is going to go in to testify. he could go in to take the fifth, which by the way is what was supposed to happen, right? like that s actually the way the law works, if you don t want to testify, you go in and take the fifth. you don t pretend that subpoenas don t exist. maybe he got a clue and he is going to take the fifth. we don t know how deeply he is cooperating and we might not know for a long time. as usual when i come on the show, ari, my question is, does merrick garland have a television? because maybe if he watched the show he would see these things that these people have been talking about, see these crimes that these people have admitted to and do something about prosecuting for them for those crimes as opposed to letting the january 6th oversight committee do all the work. well, let me ask you. you say television. what if
legislate for better guardrails to prevent something like this from happening again. the problem, of course, is that the committee, although it is bipartisan by some slim margin, it doesn t enjoy the support of the entire congress and what will come out of the oversight efforts and what they decide to promulgate is unlikely to be passed. i think we are stonewalled here by our own political polarization. what needs to happen is actually some effort from congress and we are not seeing that right now. elie is right. bill barr went the full measure but stopped short of denouncing of what he saw. he saved his own skin but didn t save all of us. what will prevent something like this from ever happening again? elie, we have a minute in this segment. you get the final word. yeah, again, there are things that the committee is doing that are good and we shouldn t discount their work. they are trying, i think, their
the results up to congress. as we speak, alternate electors. if you don t watch fox & friends, you might have missed it. and it didn t happen. it was not that formal submission of a bunch of alternate slates of electors. if there was, we d remember it. what miller admitted there matters. it shows how far he would go for trump. and it was not until many months later we learned how serious that fraudulent electors plot was. miller is in the news right now because he is testifying to the january 6th committee about all of this. that s another victory for congress. they were able to end i will miller s attempt to defy the committee. but now like so many others he is cooperating. investigators are probing his, quote, efforts to encourage state legislatures to at the outcome of the election, aka steal it, by appointing, quote,
welcome to you both. professor, your thoughts? well, so much to say, ari. not surprised at all to see that that defendant was convicted this morning. there was discussion about whether or not blaming this on donald trump would work. we have seen this kind of plea before. as i said before, there have been those involved in the drug trade and gang violence who said learn lulled in by strong charismatic figures and made to do these things without their own knowledge or own doing and it s been unavail. i think here it was similarly unavailing. whether it means donald trump will face criminal liability in the future for inciting violence is another matter. that s the focus of the january 6th select committee and the fact that stephen miller is testifying and we don t know what the subject of his testimony will be but the fact that he has decided to stop stonewalling and at least provide some testimony to that committee suggests that they are moving closer to that inner