Jamie Raskin said the revelations coming in the public hearings of the Jan 6 committee, which start this evening, will “blow the roof off the House”. I wondered at the time what that could possibly mean.
Here are a couple of thoughts. They’re more than a little bit Out There. A few years ago, what I’m about to suggest would have been unthinkable. These days… maybe not so unthinkable. We’ve seen first-hand that certain people in government are well outside any normal range of what we might consider sane. And some of them are so incredibly stupid it’s hard to see how they got elected into the positions they’re in. But that’s where we are. So here are a couple of Out There thoughts I had about what we might get to see. Make of them what you will.
First, then: Is it possible that we’ll see certain members of Congress accused of Conspiracy to Commit Murder? There have been a number of witnesses saying they saw “tour groups” in the Capitol when they shouldn’t have been there – when the building was closed for tours because of COVID, late at night, and without a Capitol Police escort. Who led those groups? Who was in the groups? Is it possible that there were leaders of the Proud Boys and other such organizations there? It’s been suggested more than once that Lauren Boebert was there, leading a tour, even, and we know she has links to those groups (there’s a well-known picture of her with Three-Percenters outside her Botulism Burger Joint in Colorado). Were they perhaps scoping out potential evacuation routes?
During the insurrection, Boebert tweeted that Nancy Pelosi was being escorted from the House Chamber. I can’t help wondering if that could have been a signal to alert people to move to those potential evacuation routes, with the intention of intercepting Pelosi and her Secret Service escort.
I’m not saying Boebert would or could have worked something like this on her own. She’s basically far too dim to have coordinated something like that alone. But we know she’s just one of several insurrectionists in government, and I don’t find it at all hard to imagine her as part of a conspiracy including, say, Paul Gosar, or Mo Brooks.
Yeah, I know. Out There.
Here’s another one. I thought it more than possible that Marjorie Taylor Greene knows more than she’s telling about the pipe bomber. But until recently it never occurred to me that maybe she is the pipe bomber. We’ve seen the videos of MTG walking around the Capitol, side-by-side with videos of the pipe bomber. They’re compelling. Now, it’s possible that the videos were cherry-picked because of the resemblance in how MTG and the pipe bomber look, or walk, or swing their arm. And after all, you have to agree that the idea of a sitting member of Congress wearing a hoodie as disguise and planting explosives in the dead of night is, well, Out There. I still think MTG knows something about the bomber, but I’m not so sure about anything more than that. But knowing what we do about her – her incredible stupidity and her crazier-than-crazy extremism – would we truly, honestly, find it beyond belief if the Committee presented rock-solid evidence (or even a confession) that she was that person?
Out There. Yep.
As I write this it’s a little more than seven hours from the start of the hearings. I guess we’ll see the beginnings, at least, of what Raskin was talking about. I guess we’ll see how Out There the Truth really is. Popcorn at the ready, folks, and hang on to your hats; I think we might be in for a wild ride.
Pete Ford 