The New Abnormal hosts recorded late, after the Jan. 6 committee's latest blockbuster hearing, where, co-host Andy Levy says, “We found out today that the mob in the capital came within 40 feet of [Vice President Pence] at one point while they were transporting him to the secure location. That sounds pretty terrifying considering, we have to remember, this is the mob that was chanting “Hang Mike Pence.’”
Later, co-host Molly Jong Fast says, “I feel like the top line is when did the president know and what did he know it? He knew it, and he still tried to do it.”
Indeed, says Jonathan Allen, senior NBC News politics reporter and co-author of Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency, “I think that it may be a mistake to look at anything that happened as particularly accidental. I’m always sort of torn a little bit when I talk to voters who are kind of like Jan. 6 deniers, because I think most of them aren’t denying that Trump was trying to hold power. I think they’re denying that it was bad.”
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Plus, Daily Beast and New York magazine contributing writer Jay Michaelson breaks down the Ginni Thomas-John Eastman mess: “If this is not an impeachable offense for a Supreme Court justice, if what we’ve seen come out in evidence is true” then what would be?
“This is the most impeachable offense I've ever seen in my entire life. I mean, this is not a gray-area case. This is unbelievable.… John Eastman, one of the somewhat more crazy lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election, said at one point that there seems to be a heated fight underway among the justices. And that’s interesting. I don’t know how he actually knew that, but now it seems that he knew that from actually being in touch with Ginni Thomas, the wife of one of the justices,” Clarence Thomas, “who is also a well-known conservative activist.”
And, “if true, disclosing secret, confidential, and to put it mildly, highly sensitive deliberations of the Supreme Court justices to somebody who he knows—his wife—is closely involved with the effort to overturn the election. And it’s fine that they have separate careers and they have separate lives. That’s fine. But you know, Molly, if I disclose this to you, we don’t have to be married for me to realize that that would probably be a problem, right? That disclosing to somebody with a close degree of not just interest but actual active participation in this effort, which is overturning an election, right, which is trying to mount some sort of a coup. So even if this was some boring insurance transaction that we were involved in, this would be a massive violation of judicial ethics. And the fact that it took place in the context of Jan. 6 is beyond shocking.”
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