[Skybird]

Comment by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. My view as well.

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Trump has put the life of his own vice president at risk. If he gets away with it, American democracy is in jeopardy.

Hearings on storming the Capitol show: Donald Trump gambled with Mike Pence's life to stay in power by force.

Did Donald Trump commit a crime on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of his supporters stormed the Capitol in Washington? For nearly a year, a nine-member House committee has been investigating that question. It has interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses and collected 140,000 documents. It is currently presenting its key findings to Americans in several public hearings. The third hearing on Thursday focused on what was probably the decisive episode: how the American president put his Vice President Mike Pence under massive pressure for days to either prevent the certification of his election defeat in Congress on January 6 or even make him the winner himself.

For Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the investigative commission, Trump clearly committed a crime: "What the president demanded of his vice president was not only wrong. It was illegal and unconstitutional." The reconstruction of events at the time seems to support this assessment. Pence, his staff and also legal advisers in the White House told Trump as early as December 2020 that the vice president of the United States had no legal authority to reject the election results of individual constituent states. But the president would not hear of it.

Trump trusted the theory of a single law professor until the very end: John Eastman. The constitutional lawyer claimed that the vice president had the power to either reject for review or even annul "disputed election results" from individual constituent states. Trump reiterated this theory in the Jan. 6 speech to his supporters in Washington, saying, "If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win. All he has to do is reject the results back to the states for a new certification, and I'll be president and you'll be the happiest people."

Apparently, however, Eastman himself did not believe in his theory. Two days before the storming of the Capitol, Eastman admitted in Trump's presence that such a move would be against the law, Greg Jacob, the then-vice president's legal adviser, testified before the investigative commission Thursday. For Pence himself, the illegality was instinctively clear, Jacob said. "It would never have occurred to the founding fathers of the United States, who abhorred the concentration of power and had shaken off British tyranny, to give one person decisive influence over the outcome of an election."

Jacob had repeated discussions with Eastman in the two days before the storming of the Capitol. In the process, he said, Eastman also admitted that the Supreme Court would shoot down his theory by a 9-0 vote if it had to address it. Jacob also reminded Eastman of the 2000 presidential election, when Democratic Vice President Al Gore lost to George W. Bush on the basis of an extremely controversial election result in Florida. "Should Gore have had the authority to declare himself president at that time?" asked Jacob. "Of course not," Eastman reportedly replied.

Eric Herschmann, a lawyer in Trump's White House, also warned Eastman against violence. The millions of voters who had voted for Biden would not stand for the action he advised: "You're going to cause riots in the streets with this."
"The Proud Boys Would Have Killed Pence"

Still, Eastman and Trump did not let go of their idea. On the morning of Jan. 6, the furious president called his vice president a "weakling" and a "pussy" in a phone call, according to ear witnesses. After his supporters had already advanced to the Capitol, Trump added fuel to the fire with a tweet: "Pence didn't have the guts to do what he should have."

The vice president thus became the central target of the violence-prone mob. "Pence betrayed us," "Hang Mike Pence," or "Pence, we're coming for you," Trump supporters chanted. When the vice president fled to a safe room in the basement of the Capitol, individual rioters were only 13 meters away from him. Among the attackers were members of the militant Proud Boys. One informant told the FBI, "The Proud Boys would have killed Pence if they had the opportunity."

Further hearings are still scheduled for next week, and the investigations by the commission of inquiry will continue thereafter. But it already seems clear that Trump bears a great deal of responsibility for the violence on January 6, 2021, which cannot go unpunished in a democratic constitutional state. Hundreds of Capitol strikers have already been arrested, charged and in some cases sentenced to prison. For justice to be served, the instigator of this movement would also have to be held accountable.

However, it would fall to Attorney General Merrick Garland to initiate criminal proceedings against Trump. Because the Republicans refused to politically condemn their president in impeachment proceedings a year and a half ago, however, Garland has only a choice between two evils: If he allows the former president to go on trial, this could lead to major political upheavals and possibly new violence. If he refrains from doing so, the foundations of the American constitutional state would be shaken.

The first evil seems to be the lesser one. Had Pence obeyed his president, it would have amounted to "a revolution in the context of a constitutional crisis," former federal judge Michael Luttig told the investigative commission Thursday. The conservative judge was once appointed by George W. Bush and even considered a Supreme Court nominee. Because Trump has remained recalcitrant to this day, Luttig believes similar scenarios to 2020 could repeat themselves in the 2024 presidential election. "Donald Trump, his allies and his supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy."

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)


Trump must be sentenced and punished. If Americans let this coup attempt go through, America has already buried its democratic system and the idea that the founding fathers once had build upon. Everything America claims to stand for, would only be a lie if Trump stays unharmed. He must face the punishement for his crime.