(Dobbs) Months Of Groundwork, Coherent Conclusions

But in a flash, a rush by Trump's defenders.

An article raced around on conservative websites this weekend and the headline is, “Trump Committed NO CRIMES.”

It’s based on an interview, after the first televised hearing of the January 6th Committee, with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz. Yes, the same Alan Dershowitz who defended Donald Trump at his second impeachment trial, the one for “incitement of insurrection.” The same Dershowitz who defended O.J. Simpson too.

His conclusion after that first night of hearings? “Donald Trump committed no crimes.”

Here’s the disconnect: the hearings had barely gotten started. If you compare the first night to a courtroom trial, you could liken it to the prosecutor’s opening statement.

But without hearing more— and without the formal judicial process that still might come in a court of law— Dershowitz already says with certainty, “Donald Trump committed no crimes.” Trump World is eating it up.

They’re complaining that there wasn’t equal time for Trump’s defense. No there wasn’t, and in today’s second hearing and those that follow, there probably won’t be. They’re complaining that the committee’s conclusions about Trump’s culpability are one-sided and biased. You bet they are, and they probably will continue to be. They’re complaining that the committee is out to “get” Trump. I think they’re right. Anyone who saw what the committee showed should be too.

But here’s the thing: Republicans had the chance to have more than two members of Congress—Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger— on the nine-member committee. If balanced justice was their goal, they could have had it. The trouble is, after Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy made his nominations for membership and included two congressmen who actually had voted to overturn the 2020 election, Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected them. How can the committee investigate the so-called Stop-The-Steal movement when some members are a part of it? But McCarthy didn’t nominate other Republicans to replace Pelosi’s rejects. He withdrew all his nominations and said the whole thing was “a sham.”

So yes, the January 6th Committee is stacked with members and staff who have heard more than a thousand interviews in connection with the insurrection that day and studied more than a hundred thousand documents and countless hours of video and concluded, Donald Trump is guilty. Guilty of conspiring to obstruct the work of Congress. And guilty, through the ceaseless circulation of lies about election fraud when even trusted advisors told him otherwise— his long-loyal Attorney General called it all “bullshit”— of conspiring to defraud the people of the United States of America.

He didn’t have to actually march on the Capitol— although he did deceitfully promise his followers he would— to conspire to attack it. To be guilty, he only had to spearhead the insurrection, taking part in planning for it and issuing encouragement to the mob that violently executed it. As a former United States Solicitor General put it, “A crime requires two things — a bad act and criminal intent.”

The January 6th Committee concluded that it has both and yes, there are consequences in that judgment and they’re not good for Trump. Representative Kinzinger rightly said on Sunday’s Face The Nation, if Trump “truly believes the election was stolen, he’s not mentally competent to be President.”

A guy I know, opening a window to the minds of millions of hoodwinked Americans, declared his belief in an email that when the Capitol was attacked, Trump “had no part in the inception of it, had no part in the origination of it, had no part in organizing it, and certainly had no part in conducting it!”

Those interviews, videos, and documents say otherwise.

But in the spirit of “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”— which also happens to be the spirit of Fox News— this guy called the committee “a kangaroo court” and declared it unfair that a finding of criminal fault “would in all likelihood render Trump unfit and unable to run for the POTUS again.”

If only.

But don’t blame the messenger. Trump has rendered himself unfit, and never again ought to be allowed anywhere near the White House.

But that’s just me. And the committee. None of us has the power to prosecute. That is up to the Department of Justice. If it makes that call, Donald Trump will get his day in court. Then, there will be equal time for Trump’s defense. There will be arguments that won’t just be one-sided and biased. There will be lawyers out to acquit Trump to rebut prosecutors out to “get” him.

That is how Donald Trump should be held accountable.

There is no dispute that between pressure on state officials and strategies to replace legal electors and coercion to have his own Vice President declare the 2020 vote invalid, Trump acted to overturn an election that universally has been declared by more than 60 courts to be honest and fair. One federal judge called his schemes “a coup in search of a legal theory.” 

At the heart of it all, Trump lost. To the tune of 74 electoral votes and more than seven million popular votes.

Alan Dershowitz said in that interview after seeing the committee’s recitations of crimes attributed to Donald Trump, “It would be the same if a leader of Black Lives Matter… stood up somewhere on the west coast and made a firebrand speech saying, ‘You know, we’re going to bring down this, we’re going to do that, and then people went out and burned buildings’.”

No it wouldn’t. Trump didn’t just make a firebrand speech. He got people there to hear it. He told them to heed it. “If you don't fight like hell,” he said at his so-called Save America March on that fateful day, “you're not going to have a country anymore.” Some of his disciples have since testified that they took that as a call to action, a command from their commander-in-chief.

And he didn’t know?!?

Of course his defenders point out that he also told the gang “to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

But you can’t tell people to fight like hell, then tell them to fight nice. You can’t claim your election was stolen, then come up with nothing to prove it. You can’t facilitate a violent attempted coup d’etat, then wait hours to stop it.

You can’t say Trump committed no crimes, then condemn those who say he did.

The battle cry of Trump’s 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton was, “Lock her up.” Whatever she did or didn’t do, it pales next to what we know Trump did do. If anyone needs to be measured for prison stripes and locked up, his name is Donald Trump.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.