A report from my home-state senator, Tommy Tuberville, provides the final, necessary piece of evidence for the Senate to find Donald Trump guilty of an impeachable offense. Now, any senator who does not do so is effectively endorsing Trump’s deliberate, knowing attempt to put his own vice president’s life in danger.
Failure to convict now moves from what, as late as Wednesday night, I considered a still debatable “judgment call” to the realm of an unforgivable moral monstrosity.
The key new evidence comes from Tuberville, the freshman Republican senator from Alabama, who told reporters Wednesday some details and timing of his call with Trump during the Capitol proceedings. To understand the importance of that call, some background is in order.
As the entire impeachment case developed, the key question always has been whether Trump did not merely encourage ordinary protests but instead knowingly encouraged the thugs who invaded the Capitol. We already knew that Trump did little or nothing to stem the tide once it had breached the building. That failure alone was a massive, and quite arguably impeachable, dereliction of duty. Still, because the House’s impeachable article doesn’t mention dereliction but instead charges him with incitement of insurrection, a technical defense of Trump might have been that failure to act is not the same as incitement and that his words before the Capitol riot were mere political hyperbole.
What then became crucial is whether Trump did or said anything to keep stirring up the crowd after he knew that the Capitol was breached. Yes, we already had hearsay evidence that he had watched the melee on TV all afternoon and was approvingly excited by what he saw. But that was hearsay. The one piece of concrete evidence we have of his state of mind was his tweet at 2:24 EST in which he accused former Vice President Mike Pence by name of lacking “courage.” What we didn’t previously know is if that was before or after Trump knew the Capitol had been breached and that the vice president, whom Trump had castigated numerous times that day, was in danger.
If Trump had finished his speech by then but had not yet sat before his TV and seen the mobs inside the Capitol, yelling for Pence’s execution, the tweet might have been a mere continuation of his reckless verbiage from earlier in the day — but, by some strained interpretations, still not incitement. If, on the other hand, he knew that the mob was inside the Capitol and that Pence was at risk, and he still tweeted something blaming Pence for failing to stop the vote after being apprised of Pence’s predicament, then there is no way to interpret the tweet other than as a message to Trump’s supportive mob that Trump wanted Pence targeted via threats or worse.
Anyone denying this is not just straining credulity but eviscerating it. Indeed, to deny it is to deny reality.
The question is, when did Trump know of Pence’s personal predicament? Because of what Tuberville told reporters yesterday, now we know.
Trump, intending to call Tuberville to ask him to delay the vote count further, called the phone of Utah Republican Mike Lee instead. We know this was in the first 15 minutes after 2 p.m. Lee gave the phone to Tuberville. Lee already had confirmed that at some point, Tuberville had to end the conversation quickly. We also know that Pence was taken from the Senate chamber at 2:14. What Tuberville added yesterday, though, was telling.
“I said, ‘Mr. President, they just took the vice president out. I’ve got to go,’” Tuberville told reporters on Wednesday.
So, around 2:15, Tuberville told Trump that security forces had whisked Pence away from the chamber. By 2:20, all members of Congress were being removed from both chambers. Four minutes after that, nine minutes after Trump’s call with Tuberville, Trump tweeted his new attack on Pence. Pence and his family were still in the building. Two minutes after Trump’s tweet, security evacuated the vice president entirely — less than a single minute before the mob reached the room where the Pences had been held.
Whether watching on TV as the entire Senate was evacuated, as numerous third-hand reports say Trump was doing, or because of his phone call with Tuberville, the president absolutely knew by the time of his anti-Pence tweet that the Capitol, which had by then been under assault for more than an hour, was being not just attacked but overrun. Even after that, Trump refused entreaties from House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy to condemn the rioters and tell them to desist.
The House impeachment managers already have built a strong and massive case. They convincingly have argued that Trump bore significant blame for recklessly riling up an angrily chanting mob to make a show of “force” to intimidate Congress into refusing to complete the electoral vote count. Not even they, though, had closed the loop of responsibility entirely. Trump’s defenders still could have offered excuses, extremely thin yet sounding at least plausible, why Trump’s culpability was limited enough to avoid Senate conviction.
Tuberville’s report takes away those excuses. Trump knew then Pence was in danger, but he kept inciting the mob against his own loyal lieutenant. The mob came within a minute of reaching its target.
Trump should be convicted, forthwith.
