The 187 Minutes At The Heart Of Trump’s Coup Attempt

Hello! It’s the weekend, this is The Weekender. ☕

As he approached the end of his Jan. 6, 2021 speech from the White House Ellipse, Donald Trump attacked his vice president, Mike Pence, yet again for refusing to steal the election for him, and announced that, actually, the “radical left” had done so on Joe Biden’s behalf. 

“It’s time that somebody did something about it,” he told the assembled mob.

Around the same time, Ryan Samsel, a Capitol rioter facing serious charges for allegedly concussing a law enforcement officer, scuffled with police at the perimeter of the U.S. Capitol grounds. A crowd followed, overwhelming the paltry police presence and toppling the metal bike racks that formed the first physical obstacle between them and Trump’s second term. 

The Capitol attack had begun. Donald Trump finished his speech at 1:10 p.m. And for 187 minutes after that, he waited to call off the attack, finally releasing a video proclaiming his love for the attackers and asking them to go home at 4:17 p.m.

That 187-minute period will be the focus of the congressional Jan. 6 committee when it holds a hearing – potentially its last – this coming Thursday. What was Trump doing during all that time?

Well: Trump watched the mayhem unfold on television at the White House. Rioters attacked police and members of the media. A police officer shot and killed a rioter as she scrambled toward a hallway used by members of Congress. Pence, evacuated to a secure location in the Capitol, refused to get into a waiting Secret Service vehicle, because, he reportedly said, “If I get in that vehicle, you guys are taking off.”

The prospect of a successful coup lingered in the air.

And still – Trump waited, watching, reportedly enamored with how “all these people are coming to fight for me.”

When the committee convenes again this week, they’ll put the pieces together: Not only focused on what Trump did and didn’t do for 187 minutes – but why?

More on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Matt Shuham

Has The DOJ Run Out Of Time?

Sad!

The odd mix of DOJ activity and apparent inertness has fed a discussion among former DOJ officials about what, exactly, it is that federal prosecutors are doing about former President Trump’s attempt to overturn the election. Is Attorney General Merrick Garland, like the prosecutors who failed to nab any executive after the 2008 financial crash, blowing it? Or has he been running an aggressive but quiet probe into not only the violence of January 6, but the broader attempt to subvert the election?

It’s hard to say, and the answer is likely somewhere in between. Some former feds, like Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, believe that Garland has gone too slowly. Others argue that it’s impossible to know what’s going on within – that even though we haven’t seen overt news, like more subpoenas, reports of people flipping, and otherwise, it’s very difficult to know what’s going on in a federal criminal probe from without. The problem here, however, is that if Garland is as concerned as he seems about being seen as running a politically motivated investigation, that’s not going to get any easier any time soon: Trump is likely set to announce his candidacy in the next few months.

— Josh Kovensky

You Just Got Manched 

The senior senator from West Virginia is up to his old tricks again. And by tricks, I mean negotiating with his fellow Democrats until the legislative language is literally being typed out just to abruptly change his mind and exit negotiations — based on basically nothing.

This time, he was in talks with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) for weeks on a plan that would have included some climate provisions like tax credits for clean energy, lowered prescription drug costs for seniors, extensions of some must-extend Affordable Care Act subsidies to avoid a catastrophic coverage cliff and raised taxes on some wealthy Americans. In short: it was exactly the deal Manchin said he’d support after he torpedoed the Build Back Better package on TV following months of protracted negotiations.

Reportedly stunning Schumer’s staffers, Manchin pulled out of the deal Thursday night, citing high inflation rates. The rates have been high since they began negotiating, and it’s hard to see how such a decidedly non-stimulus package would have had a significant inflationary impact. But we’ve seen this movie before, and Manchin didn’t seem to care that his inflationary concerns about BBB didn’t hold water either.

President Joe Biden followed the news with a statement vowing to take executive action on climate. In the meantime, he urged Democrats to make a deal with Manchin on lowering prescription drugs costs and averting the ACA disaster.

It’s a far cry from the package the President envisioned at the beginning of his term: one stuffed with aggressive climate change mitigation, health care cost reforms and revolutionary social programs. But those dreams are about as outdated as Manchin’s February 2021 promise that “we’re going to make Joe Biden successful.” 

— Kate Riga

• On the constitutional sheriffs beat: A half dozen sheriffs from across the country addressed a far-right conference focused on bogus claims of voter fraud this week. The event, hosted by the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association, featured speeches from several Republican state lawmakers as well as fringe election deniers including MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, ex-Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne, and Jovan Hutton Pulitzer, a former treasure hunter who’s claimed without evidence to have developed a technology that uses microscopic imaging to root out cheating in elections. 
• A Colorado judge issued an arrest warrant for Mesa County, Colorado clerk Tina Peters Thursday after she attended the above far-right sheriffs conference in Las Vegas earlier in the week, saying Peters had violated the terms of her release, which required the court’s permission to travel out of state.
• Conservatives and right-wing media alike had a collective meltdown over the story about the rape of a 10-year-old child who had an abortion this week. The right’s gasket-blowing over the story and their subsequent botched handling of the narrative has exploded further in the last few days, with commentators and politicians alike attempting to poke holes in the narrative in order to push a broader anti-abortion message. But ever since a man was arrested and criminally charged for the rape, conservatives have scrambled to respond to scrutiny. And to get their story straight.
• As Red States Try To Seal Borders Against Abortion, Mailed Pills Zoom Around The US: House Democrats brought a bill to the floor this week to assert, specifically, that the freedom of interstate commerce supersedes any state prohibitions on abortion pills. It’ll die in the Senate but here’s more from Kate Riga.
• And on a lighter note: A man in Minnesota was federally charged with fraud on Tuesday after he vandalized his own home and camper, falsely claimed he’d been targeted for being a Trump supporter and then tried to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars in insurance for what he called an “Arson Hate Crime.”

Customs and Border Protection recently carried out a drug smuggling bust at the southern border in Arizona, during which more than 10,000 fentanyl pills were seized.

And Rep. Mary Miller (R-IL) knows exactly what that means: “Biden is letting drugs flow into our country to kill our people.”

That was the take the Illinois Republican offered on Sunday in response to news of the operation that ostensibly prevented the drugs from coming in.

Nevertheless! “This is a terrorist chemical attack on our country and the Biden Admin is encouraging it by keeping our border open,” Miller tweeted furiously.

— Cristina Cabrera