Does testifying at the Jan. 6 hearings make Republicans like Jared Kushner and Bill Barr “good guys”? It depends on who you ask.
“These are the guys who are like ‘Team Reality.’ So they’re not good guys. They’re still bad guys, but they’re not really bad guys,” says Molly Jong-Fast, co-host of The New Abnormal podcast.
Co-host Andy Levy is having a hard time seeing it that way, especially when thinking about former Attorney General Bill Barr’s testimony.
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“All I keep thinking is Bill Barr is also the guy who said that he would still vote for Trump in 2024. You were the attorney general, you were being directed by the president to make up shit and to investigate made-up shit that had to do with a free and fair election that he lost… That was your job, to tell the president he was wrong over and over again. And you’re gonna go out there and say, ‘I’d vote for him in 2024’? Like, there is something wrong with Bill Barr? I just want to get that out there,” says Andy.
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The two hosts do agree that Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump think that they’re “too smart to get tripped up.” When, in reality, says Molly, they were “sitting for hours and hours of testimony and accidentally saying all the stuff that the committee had wanted them to say.”
“Jared is the kind of person who would defend himself in court because he thinks that he’s smarter than everyone else—and in reality is very stupid,” quips Andy.
Molly digs a little deeper into what she calls “the psychology of Jared Kushner.”
“His dad went to jail. So jail is a real thing that can happen [for him], whereas I think a lot of fancy people don’t believe that they could ever go to jail because it’s so unusual,” she says. “And then, of course, he has this belief that he’s brilliant because his father gave a lot of money and he went to an Ivy League college. So it’s this very interesting dichotomy of like a stupid person who believes he’s smart and is at the base very immoral, but is slightly worried about consequences in a way the other Trump kids aren’t.”
Also in this episode, The Nation columnist Jeet Heer explains to Molly why Democrats shouldn’t trust Liz Cheney and CNN national security reporter Zachary Cohen points out one of the big question marks on the Jan. 6 timeline that the committee is trying to piece together: What happened when Donald Trump was in the Oval Office dining room?
“We know that he was surrounded by several [people], including Ivanka Trump, but there is no record of what he was saying and who he was talking to and what he was doing or not doing during that time, which is when the riot was actually unfolding,” says Cohen.
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