From Joyce Vance at MSNBC.com:
A lot of ink has been spilled on the topic of whether Trump knew he’d lost the election. It’s an important question — if not the mostimportant question in the context of potential criminal culpability.
Thursday, the committee seriously undercut the theory that Trump actually believed his “big lie.” (And one strongly suspects the committee is not done yet in this regard). Tonight we learned, for example, that Trump was told by both his data experts and his own attorney general that he’d lost.
This matters because of a legal doctrine called “willful blindness,” which says a defendant can’t continue to maintain he didn’t know something — in this case, that Trump didn’t know he’d lost the election — if they have been credibly notified of the truth. Hearing the truth from your attorney general, a man who’d gone along with virtually all of your other whims, would seem to qualify. Even Ivanka was compelled by the evidence against fraud, saying she respected and believed Barr when he said no fraud tainted the outcome of the election. Trump’s continued insistence that he’d won, despite credible evidence there wasn’t any fraud and he’d actually lost, puts prosecutors one step closer to having the evidence necessary to bring criminal charges.
Willful blindness is especially relevant in terms of Trump’s efforts to compel Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him 11,780 votes. (Raffensberger will reportedly testify in person later in these hearings.) 11,780, of course, was the precise number of votes Trump needed to beat Biden in the state. It seems almost too obvious to bear repeating, but if you know you’ve lost, and you ask people you think are on your side to manufacture enough ballots to let you win, then you’re engaging in criminal conduct.
From Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC.com:
I’ve lost track of all the bombshells in Cheney’s opening statement, but don’t sleep on this one: Multiple members of Congress desperately sought pardons from Trump for their efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The key part here is not that they sought pardons, but why they wanted them. It suggests consciousness of guilt from these members. Or to put in simpler terms: They knew they had done something wrong.
