Thursday night's public hearing by the House Jan. 6 committee made one thing very clear: Donald Trump is personally in the crosshairs. They are coming for him with receipts, in the form of testimony from some of his closest aides and allies. The committee seems prepared to destroy any pretense that Trump was a casual bystander to the insurrection. In fact, its members are building a case that he actively encouraged it, and that by refusing to take action for many hours that day, he was an actual accomplice.
The committee plans to going to knock down the Big Lie by answering a big legal and moral question: Did Trump know he had lost the election? The answer is clear: Yes, he did. Everyone around him told him so. His former aide and current associate Jason Miller testified that their own number-crunchers told him he had lost. Attorney General Bill Barr told him that spreading the lie that the election was stolen was "bullshit." His own daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified that she believed what Barr said. And we learned all of this from hearing their very own words in videotaped testimony, which made it all the more powerful.
