You see in the feature story that Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager after Brad Parscale got canned, is going to be a star witness at the second Jan. 6th committee hearing tomorrow night. I wanted to remind you that Stepien was once a top operative and advisor to Chris Christie. But he fell from grace as part of the Bridgegate scandal back in 2013. When the scandal hit, Christie made Stepien one of the scapegoats. He cut him loose like a dog, as Trump might say. (Stepien himself was never charged with a crime though two of his colleagues were charged and were later convicted, before having their convictions tossed by the Supreme Court.)

There are many things that came out of the first Jan 6th hearing. We’ll talk more about them going forward and we’ll see these points unfolded, I assume, in subsequent hearings. But one point already came through pretty clearly and well and that is the integral role of the two fascist paramilitaries, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers.

From TPM Reader SC …

I don’t write in often (20 years and three emails, IIRC), but I feel a need to add some balance to the letter from MB that you just posted. MB complains of the lack of discussion of “incompetence” — and I agree on the philosophical issue presented that incompetence demands removal — but the problem is that Chesa, while not great, has not shown incompetence in his position as DA. Is he great? No. Is he a smooth politician? God, no. But in the context of SF DAs going back to Arlo Smith, he is…OK. Disruptive, but relatively effective overall.

From TPM Reader MB …

I’ve heard a lot of pundits discussing the recall in SF as a repudiation of the progressive movement. Honestly I think it’s dead wrong. I voted for Chesa and I wanted the recall. It’s progressive to expect competent and effective government.

I would say the first hearing was pretty powerful. The second half was emotively powerful. But it was the first portion of the hearing which seemed to make some critical connections and add some new facts that I either wasn’t aware of or hadn’t seen connected like that before. There were a lot examples where they hinted at things to come – claiming that the White House was getting lots of intelligence that violence was being planned.

As I mentioned earlier, the part that seemed new to me was seeing so many Trump diehards saying straightforwardly that the whole thing was a lie. That’s not new information. Or not surprising information. But it’s remarkable to see it so clearly. That the whole thing was a lie. A cynical lie. We know that. But this just brings it to the fore in such a graphic way.

The one other point I’ll emphasize again: I didn’t quite grasp how much of this would be wrong-footing the Trump world. You’ve got existing diehards. Not just like Bill Barr who we know has basically washed his hands of Trump. But people who still very much in that world saying yeah that was all crap. That has to sow a lot of dissension in that milieu and put Trump on the warpath against his own loyalists.

Curious to see more.

As we watch these synchronous videos, I am reminded what I was doing when this was happening. We were actually recording an episode of our podcast. I don’t remember if I had a TV feed on or I was watching posted videos on social media. But I remember watching what seemed like just rowdy protests, people getting rowdy outside the perimeter of the Capitol. There’s nothing unprecedented about that. Protests get rowdy sometimes. But at one point I distinctly remember watching what seemed like breaking through police lines, or perhaps it was simply attacking the police lines.

So as we were talking in the podcast at one point I said something like, it seems to be getting a little out of control. I may go back and pull up that episode to see exactly what I said. I’m probably retrospectively shaping some of what I thought or said. But what I’m confident about is having a moment where I could tell things were escalating beyond any normal kind of protest. We know where it went from there.

8:50 PM: For a moment there I thought they were going to have Jared Kushner do another hero turn as they have with other Trumpers, including the President’s daughter. Didn’t turn out that way.

8:40 PM: “The White House was receiving specific reports in the days leading up to January 6th, including during President Trump’s rally, indicating that elements in the crowd were preparing for violence at the Capitol.”

8:31 PM: Pardons. We have pardons.

8:23 PM: I didn’t fully get this in advance. But clearly in addition to getting the story out there, one of the dynamics here is turning the Trump world against itself, showing deposition after deposition in which Trumpers – people who continue to be big Trumpers – say clearly that all the central claims, the bases of Trumpism, are BS.

8:18 PM: “Mike Pence deserves it.” Trump on supporters desire to hang Mike Pence. Yikes.

8:12 PM: Notable that Thompson places the fulcrum of our small-r republican history in the Civil War. This is true both for the decades that preceded the Civil War and those that followed it. So much of our discussion of our republican history centers on the Revolution. And for good reason. But in the focus on the vindication of the rights and liberties of American citizens and in the struggle against the domestic enemies of the American republic, the Civil War remains at the center of our national life.

I wanted to share a few quick thoughts with you before tonight’s hearings.

One very minor point is that for some time I’ve heard complaints to the effect of, “what has the committee been doing all this time? Most of what we’ve found out about January 6th has been from the media.” This is mostly a misunderstanding. The great majority of reporting you’ve seen over the last six months revealing texts and other material about the insurrection originated with the committee’s investigation. So this isn’t an either/or. The committee investigation has almost certainly been the primary generator of new information even though very little of it has come officially from the investigation.

We mentioned last week that after the top GOP candidates for the Michigan governor’s race were stripped from the ballot over forged signatures, the remaining at least nominal frontrunner (poll leaders in most recent poll) was a guy named Ryan Kelley, who was literally part of the mob that stormed the Capitol building on January 6th and had a lot of connections to the guys who plotted to kidnap and murder Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. Well, he just got arrested by the FBI. No details yet on what the charges are or why he was taken into custody.

11:49 AM: Kelley’s arrest was part of a raid on his home and stems from his actions breaching the Capitol complex on January 6th. Charges forthcoming.

This is just a wild story. Really a sign of the times in many ways. A seventy-something Democratic protestor showed up at a Republican event in Arizona with far-right Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters. He was clearly there looking to make a stir. The man, Peter Jackson, had on a Black Lives Matter shirt, a “Jail Trump” hat and a mask. So clearly he wasn’t going to blend in. He also had his phone out videotaping. So he clearly wanted a record of how the crowd reacted. But he wasn’t violent in any way. The crowd quickly got violent with him, punching him, knocking him down. The Masters supporters claimed that he attacked a woman. The video clearly shows that’s not true. At one point Masters puts his hands around the guy’s neck and starts throttling him. It would probably be a bit much to say he tried to strangle him. But it wouldn’t be wildly off the mark. Anyway, THIS IS ALL ON VIDEO.