Bannon On Jan. 5: "All Hell Is Going To Break Loose Tomorrow." What Did Trump Know-- And When?

Michael Isikoff reported yesterday that Adam Schiff is ramping up the pressure on the Biden Administration to not like Trump slip away from his criminal behavior with nothing more than approbation by about half the population and, eventual, probable century from writers of history. "In unusually pointed comments about a member of President Biden’s Cabinet," wrote Isikoff, "House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff says he 'vehemently' disagrees with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s failure so far to aggressively investigate former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and other matters. Appearing Tuesday on the Yahoo News Skullduggery podcast, the California Democrat was asked about the Garland Justice Department’s reluctance to launch investigations of the former president based on the 2018 report by former special counsel Robert Mueller that spelled out Trump’s efforts to obstruct the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a new book, Midnight in Washington: How We Almost Lost Our Democracy and Still Could, Schiff writes that he viewed Mueller’s report as providing 'a factual basis to charge the president with multiple crimes of obstruction.'"

“I think there's a real desire on the part of the attorney general, for the most part, not to look backward,” Schiff said in response. “Do I disagree with that? I do disagree with that, and I disagree with it most vehemently when it comes to what I consider even more serious offenses. For example, a taped conversation of Donald J. Trump on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state from Georgia, trying to coerce him into fraudulently finding 11,780 votes.

“Because I think if you or I did that, we'd be under indictment by now,” Schiff added. “In my view, you don't ignore the crimes that have been committed by a president of the United States. They need to be investigated. You may reach the judgment once you've investigated something that the public interest in not prosecuting a former president outweighs the interests of justice. But I don't think you could ignore the crimes.”

...My view in light of Nixon being pardoned, the Justice Department taking a position you can't prosecute a sitting president, which I also disagree with-- to say now that as a practical matter you can't prosecute a former president would make the president above the law.

“And that's a dangerous proposition in the abstract. Given that Trump is, I think, already running for president again, it's an even more dangerous prospect for the future.”

And that isn't even the biggest news involved with the select committee investigating Trump's coup attempt and riot. Watch that video of Liz Cheney speaking last night to the committee up top. She makes the point that not just Bannon, but also Trump, was "personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th... Based on the committee’s investigation, it appears that Bannon had substantial advance knowledge of the plans for Jan. 6 and likely had an important role in formulating those plans. Bannon was in the war room at the Willard on Jan. 6. He also appears to have detailed knowledge regarding the president’s efforts to sell millions of Americans the fraud that the election was stolen."

She went on to state that Bannon's and Trump's bogus executive privilege arguments "do appear to reveal one thing. They suggest that President Trump was personally involved in the planning and execution of January 6th."

The Committee then voted unanimously to hold Bannon in contempt of Congress for evading his subpoena, something he is reveling in and something Republicans are treating like an honorable badge of courage. Tomorrow the whole House will vote on whether or not to send contempt advisory to the Justice Department. This was Trump's statement in response:

A few days ago, the Wall Street Journal floated a counterintuitive conspiracy theory: Trump's a Democrat trying to undermine the GOP from inside. Right-wing lunatic Gerard Baker asked "What if he is a Democratic plant, the product of a brilliant conspiracy by the progressive left to help achieve the kind of social and economic transformation of the country that Americans would otherwise never conceive of voting for? Is it possible that for the past six years we have all been the victims of one of the greatest double-bluffs in political history? That even as Democrats and their messengers in the media whipped up the idea that the U.S. had been hijacked by the Kremlin, they were the ones manipulating the Republican Party’s political processes to get their way?

[A]n insane conspiracy theory might be as good an explanation as any of how Mr. Trump somehow keeps coming to the rescue of the Democrats just as they look to be burying themselves in their own extremism, hypocrisy and unfitness for office.

The thought is prompted by the former president’s broadside last week, in which he more or less instructed his supporters to do something that should produce Democratic landslides in forthcoming elections.

...It’s not as though the strategy hasn’t worked perfectly before. In January, incensed by his failure to convince enough people that he had actually won last November’s election, he and some of his so-called aides suggested voters in Georgia shouldn’t bother showing up in the state’s Senate runoff election because that too was going to be rigged.

The result: Just enough Republicans who had voted in the first round last November declined to follow up in the Jan. 5 runoff, and we got Two Senators Who Changed the World. Or at least tried to.

To that helpful intervention by Mr. Trump can be attributed trillions of dollars in prospective tax and spending increases, several confirmations of far-left Biden nominees, and this continuing offense against sanity: Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders.

And this is the gift that keeps on giving to Democrats. If Mr. Trump’s latest campaign is successful, he may well deter just enough voters from going to the polls in next month’s knife-edge Virginia governor’s race, thereby handing the Old Dominion to a Democratic Party that thinks it owns your children and has the right to tell them what to think.