Scene of the Trump crime
Republican Mark Meadows is in the lead to be this week’s Villain of the Week, although he has competition from cohorts such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham of Fox “News,” and as always, Donald Trump. That’s because, after many months of the mainstream media ignoring or downplaying the January 6, 2021 terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol that sought to overturn the election of Joe Biden as President, regular folks finally got fed up enough to light up the airwaves and share incriminating information about the Republicans.
In particular, word got around very quickly on Tuesday, by a vote of 222-208, the U.S. House of Representatives held Meadows in criminal Contempt of Congress. The vote took place after Meadows, a former Republican Congressman and White House Chief of Staff to Trump, who had originally cooperated with the House Committee, suddenly stopped cooperating, defying a subpoena to appear for a deposition, and indeed sued the committee and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, attempting to defeat the subpoena for both his deposition and phone records. Before that happened, Meadows had turned over to the Committee a Republican PowerPoint presentation recommending Trump to declare a “National Security Emergency” in order to remain in the presidency rather than turn over power to Biden on Inauguration Day. Meadows had also given the committee text messages he received on January 6 while serving as Trump’s Chief of Staff, including ones from Hannity, Ingraham and Brian Kilmeade of Fox, and several from Donald Trump, Jr. These texts all had the same desperate tone, begging Meadows to get Donald Trump to stop the insurrection at the Capitol. For example, one of Ingraham’s texts read:
Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.
Likewise, Hannity’s January 6 text to Meadows, talking about Trump, was:
Can he make a statement? … Ask people to leave the Capitol.
At the same time and afterward, however, folks like Ingraham and Hannity went on TV and tried to blame the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack on the left, knowing full well that the attackers were right-wing MAGA followers under Trump’s control. It’s also noteworthy that Donald Trump, Jr. apparently could not or would not contact his father directly on January 6, instead going through Meadows to try to do so.
One place where this news of all of this went viral was on Twitter, where we started seeing information like this for the first time:
Liz Cheney drops bombshell during hearing — and suggests Trump 'was personally involved in the planning of January 6th' https://t.co/GKUhjn1Yw1
— Rod Johnson🆘🌊 Wearing a Mask While Fully Vaxxed (@pcrod) December 13, 2021
The MSM should be blasting out headlines non stop about the #CoupPowerPoint #COUP but they’re currently busy writing hard-hitting investigative reports about the VP’s copper pots and Bluetooth aversion. 🙄
— Resister 🟧 (@friendandlover) December 11, 2021
This outpouring of incriminating information and revulsion on the internet this week eventually swamped the mainstream media, likely influencing big media organizations finally to cover the January 6 attack in some proper context, meaning that all roads seem to lead to Donald Trump and other Republican leaders. As one analyst wrote on Tuesday:
these 1/6 hearings are going to be so much bigger than press thought.
and remember, GOP thought it was being super savvy by pulling all its members from committee. (not including Cheney, Kinzinger)
it will turn out to be perhaps McCarthy's biggest blunder
— Eric Boehlert (@EricBoehlert) December 14, 2021
And therein lies the lesson: If the media won’t do their job voluntarily and in a timely fashion, its up to us to build the story ourselves and eventually get the media to cover it. In this case, nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake.
Photo by Tyler Merbler, used under Creative Commons license. https://is.gd/Si6tix
