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Analysis: New revelations betray depth of Trump's post-election schemes
A stunning daily stream of revelations is shedding new light on the depraved effort by Donald Trump, his aides and extremist Republicans to cover up the former President's constitutional arson and desperate bid to steal power after the 2020 election.
Politics
(CNN)A stunning daily stream of revelations is shedding new light on the depraved effort by Donald Trump, his aides and extremist Republicans to cover up the former President's constitutional arson and desperate bid to steal power after the 2020 election.
It is extraordinary that more than 13 months after the US Capitol insurrection, the depth of Trump's lawlessness and abuses of power is still coming into view. It will be for the House committee probing the attack to paint the complete picture and to weigh in on whether they think there was a criminal conspiracy and the extent to which Trump knew about it and directed it.
But new evidence and reporting already strongly suggests Trump's team presided over multiple schemes to discredit the election; sought to steal President Joe Biden's win in the states with rogue lawyers; encouraged fake electors; and sought to block its certification in Congress.
Wednesday's revelations alone underscored the vast scope of the committee's investigation, the troubling breadth of the subversion effort and what increasingly looks like a Trump world cover-up.
The National Archives asked the Justice Department to investigate Trump's handling of presidential records, all of which should have been turned over when his administration ended. The request followed multiple reports that Trump tore up documents and that Archives staff had to tape back together some that were handed over to the House committee.
In another staggering development, The Washington Post reported that Trump's onetime lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked a Republican prosecutor in Michigan to hand over county voting machines, based on a false cheating conspiracy theory.
The committee has now subpoenaed yet another key former White House official, Trump's trade adviser Peter Navarro, who played a major role in elevating false conspiracy theories about a stolen election.
And late on Wednesday, The New York Times reported that some of the documents improperly taken to Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort were believed to have been classified. While a President can declassify any material at any time, the story suggests Trump is guilty of gross hypocrisy given his criticism of Hillary Clinton over classified material on her email server that may have cost her the 2016 election.
New details defy Trump's cover-up effort
Wednesday's torrent of disclosures only hints at the size of the election-stealing effort operated out of the Trump White House and of the House committee's investigation of events that culminated in one of the darkest days in US political history.
If there is any comfort for those who believe in American democracy, it is that all of the schemes failed -- often due to the courage of local and state officials, many of them Republicans. But it became ever more clear Wednesday that an ex-President and a corps of fellow believers were willing to attempt to defy the will of voters with authoritarian measures.
That reality underscores the grave danger facing future elections in the US. Trump is seeking to insert like-minded activists and candidates in key positions overseeing elections in what looks like an attempt to destroy safeguards that prevented him from stealing the last election. It is also alarming that while US foes like Russia and China are escalating efforts to discredit democracy in the US and worldwide, their goals are shared by Americans working to destroy it from the inside.
The latest details about the insurrection emerged despite incessant efforts by Trump and those around him to obstruct the January 6 investigation. The President waged a failed campaign right up to the Supreme Court to stop West Wing documents making it to the House committee. Some of his aides have made spurious claims of executive privilege to frustrate the panel, which said Wednesday it had nevertheless conducted 500 interviews. Republicans in the House had tried to stop the investigation even starting and are sure to close it down if they win the majority in November's midterm elections.
Committee's progress prompts extreme reactions
The closer the committee appears to discovering the truth, the more unhinged is the reaction from the Trump camp.
Over weekend, in a resolution censuring two Republicans serving on the January 6 panel, the Republican National Committee described the insurrection as "legitimate political discourse." That was followed on Wednesday by Navarro unleashing an unmoored outburst after he was subpoenaed by the panel to explain alleged efforts to delay the certification of 2020 election results. He accused the committee, which is investigating an unprecedented insurrection designed to overturn a US election, of being "domestic terrorists."