Hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes. I'm here to let you know the very first episode of my special mini series, Why Is This Happening? The A.I.N. game is out right now.
In this series, I talk to a variety of experts each week about A.I. and what it actually is, what it means for us. To kick things off, I spoke with journalist Derek Tonson. He's been spending the better part of the last year trying to get his arms around the same question I am.
Just how big a deal is this? These guys don't really know exactly what it is they're building. They don't know exactly what's behind the door that they're planning to open six months from now. Why is this happening?
The A.I.N. game, a special mini series. Listen now, wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm Ari Melber and this is a Beat Special Report inside Trump's election plot.
On the effort to steal a race and stage a coup with new evidence tonight, showing this is far broader than even prosecutors first thought. We're breaking down the path to a criminal conspiracy and why experts now think the most serious charges may be yet to come. Why are we doing this now? The House insurrection hearing showed the nation that January 6 was more organized than many realized.
The committee devoted to investigating that day has revealed truths about that day. And yet, the House probe has also underscored something new to many. Trump's plot to overthrow the election was far broader than one day or prepping a one day crime spree. It wasn't illegal, coup conspiracy starting before the election and lasting months.
With criminal plots that had nothing to do with even January 6 and illegal orders by Trump that were resisted. So we're going to show this to you tonight how it began with things that are perfectly legal, like filing lawsuits to challenge the results. But quickly morphed into something much broader, a conspiracy that involves crimes, the January 6 insurrection that we know about, but a whole set of other criminal plots. This is vital to any potential set of indictments and we're going to get to all that tonight through the evidence to show you exactly what's new and what matters.
Now, if any of that sounds familiar, remember, that's not the theory the Justice Department used when it first opened this probe. It wasn't even the original view of Congress, hence the name January 6 committee. So, was this just a riot that got out of control? Was it ultimately a Trump ploy that Mike Pence heroically stopped?
Those are common explanations we have heard over time. They are wrong. The evidence available now enables us to report tonight something we could not go to air with, say in January 2021. This was a full, coup conspiracy.
American democracy may turn on whether enough people know that fact. And this evidence that we're going to go through tonight, it cuts to the heart of accountability for that coup conspiracy for its leader, and its premeditated plotters and enablers, most of whom never did take a physical step in distorting the Capitol that day, which brings us back to the difference between an attack on one day January 6 and a wider coup attempt. More than 850 people have been indicted for the Capitol violence with more than 320 convictions and counting. Those people at the Capitol, the criminal muscle pursuing just one of these plots we're going to go through tonight, let's be clear.
Trump treated them like pawns, the rest of the players on the board, Donald Trump's coup plotters and operatives and lawyers. None of them have been indicted for the evidence of a more intricate, secret, high level set of plots to illegally overthrow than President-elect Biden. Now, if it was a one day riot, then that might be the proper legal outcome. But if it was a coup conspiracy and the most powerful people, the ones in White House meetings, guarded by federal agents with guns, paid by your tax dollars, wheeling the power of prosecution force, even the military, if they ultimately get away with their attempted coup, well, what does that do?
The writer-dog boarder put it simply. If Trump's coup attempt goes unpunished, it will become a training exercise. That's where we are right now. The understanding of what happened and what we do about it determines whether this becomes an aberration or a training exercise.
Those are some of the stakes in the evidence that we're going to show you tonight. So we begin where this began before election day. Most candidates throw everything at winning. Trump had a different plan to either win or steal the race as soon as it looked like he was losing, which he telegraphed in September while his 2016 campaign chair, Steve Bannon, previewed a very similar, declared victory plan.
Will you commit to making sure that there is a peaceful, transparent, pearl of power after the election? Well, we're going to have to see what happens. What Trump's going to do is declare victory. And that doesn't mean he's the winner.
He's going to say the winner. Will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified? President Trump? I'm urging my supporters to go into the polls and watch very carefully.
There it was. That was the plan. That's evidence of illicit intent. And then Trump lied and purported to claim victory late on election night.
That itself is unprecedented in American history. It was way late into the night or the early morning. And we were fact checking his claims that he would be the one to decide the results of the election he was running in. Trump is losing right now in both the popular vote and the electoral vote.
Frankly, we did win this election. This is a major fraud in our nation. So we'll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.
The election and the counting and the processing of ballots is not controlled legally by the president. The president would not have to do that if he thought he was going to win the election. Everyone saw that in real time. And as the House Committee probe showed, here is what Trump's aids.
We're urging then behind the scenes. My recommendation was to say that votes were so being counted, I would say that we should not go into clear victory. The results were still being counted. Now, one internal debate over messaging does not make for a crime.
Candidates can legally lie or refuse to ever concede. But here's what's different. Donald Trump Jr. was secretly telling Trump's top age, if it's at Meadows, quote, we have multiple paths.
We control them all. Was that bluster or an admission? Well, our report is going to track exactly how that was the plot. Several paths to overturn the result.
We're still the race. We count at least eight distinct plans. Some were legal. We marked them in green.
Some are legally debatable, marked in yellow. But most of them you will see tonight turned either unconstitutional or criminally illegal. These are the big bad red plots to steal the race, to stage an illegal coup. And we will show you they spend weeks and sometimes months.
Now, after all the documents and testimony, it can be hard to see the entire alleged criminal conspiracy without seeing these plots on this actual timeline. So let's focus right now on those first two lawsuits and installing Trump electors in Biden States. Now, initial preparation for electors is generally legal and lawsuits are legal. Trump began with these legal long shots, but they quickly failed.
Over 50 of the campaign's 57 lawsuits ending within a month. None ever made it to the Supreme Court for a hearing, let alone or a victory. Now, with Biden declared the winner, the case has seemed like kind of a sideshow platform for Rudy Giuliani's press conferences. At the time, few saw them as a real path to holding power.
Fraud. An absolute fraud. I mean, you can't just submit these ballots, then not have them checked. They're highly suspect ballots.
That could have been Mickey Mouse. That could have been a dead person. I'd fire everybody that was involved in this election. But the voters fired Trump and the judges rejected those cases.
That's the reality that matters, because as that door closed, Trump's staff increasingly turned more focused on installing Trump electors in states that Biden had won. This was a kind of Hail Mary alternative to court where they were losing as early as November around the election date. Captain veteran Rick Perry secretly lobbied the White House on what he called an aggressive strategy to have Republican officials just send their own electors in for Trump. And that fraud would somehow in their view override what the actual voters did in those states, which Biden won.
Well, that started early. And Trump lawyers wrote it up into a formal plan within 11 days of Biden's win, the goal to get electors pledged to Trump to meet on December 14th and lie and claim they represented in voters in states that went for Biden, not Trump. But the Electoral College formalized Biden's win on that day, December 14th, as headlines show. That is why some of the people lying for Trump, pretending they were electors in states that Trump lost.
That's why they may end up indicted or in prison. They continued on with that elector fraud after that date. So they can't claim they were just alternate electors, just in case a court ruling changed the result in their state or something. No, they kept on with their fraud to overturn what was the completed and final Electoral College vote at the key point.
Now, those are individual random people that are kind of just pretending to be electors. You can think of them, albeit with their fraud is randos. But another overlapping plot was pushed by Trump lawyer John Eastman, the former Clarence Thomas Clerk, who Republican senators touted for his really interesting research where he pushed beyond those randos. And he was pitching entire state legislators, toss the voting results for Biden and just steal their entire state for Trump.
One memo pitching this as a state getting to quote, choose who won and saying that Trump would win and they would name the electors. They also sometimes called it a quote, legislative override of the whole election. And we now know another Republican was texting Trump's top aide also in November, encouraging the state legislators to do that plot. And then Mark Meadows, that top chief of staff to Trump at the time said, quote, I love it.
Now, at the time, Giuliani's long winding briefings to state legislators did seem to many like just another desperate misdirection or it was reduced as PR. The memos weren't public then. Now it looks different. Now it's clearly a part of an organized written coup conspiracy, getting local Republicans to go toss the votes.
And as the other pass narrow by December 7th, the White House itself was working on a coup through this elector fraud with emails about a quote path to stealing the election through these legislatures and Meadows not only saying he liked it or loved it, no, now he says, quote, he was working on that as of yesterday. Now, Mr Meadows thought that would stay secret, but he ends up marking this plot's birthday if crimes have birthdays. A judge later finding that illicit goal of that plot was quote fully formed by December 7th, which is the date that the coup lawyer I mentioned Eastman was also circulating. This is the workings of this coup conspiracy.
Well, that would be wrong. And according to many experts, completely illegal, even if there never was an insurrection on the 6th. And we check the records and some of the unlawful details have leaked out at the time. But again, this is what's so important.
They may have seemed a bit more like illusion in PR at the time than what they look like now, which is a indictable criminal conspiracy. Tonight, we can report this was a very real attempt to launder and normalize in public. What I'm about to show you in public at the time, what they we now know we're conspiring about in private, elector fraud and states just stealing the vote. Today, an alternate slave electors in the contested states is going to vote.
And we're going to send those results up to Congress. There's something that Rudy and the team have worked on. The Trump's slate of electors are showing up today in the state capitals. We fought to see the electors.
There has been an alternate slate of electors voted upon that Congress will decide in January. Yes, I was part of the process to make sure there were alternate electors. Both of Mr Eastman's proposals would violate several provisions of the Electoral Count Act. Mr Eastman acknowledged that that was the case.
We the under sign being the do we elected and qualified electors, hereby certified following. For president Donald J Trump of the state of Florida, number of votes 11. Those last two pieces of evidence that you can hear and see, they're about the Trump lawyer Eastman, knowing the plots were illegal, admitting that to others in private. And then those Trump officials committing what looks like a lector fraud.
And that brings us to the smoking gun, showing how many of these people knew they were breaking the law in this conspiracy when our report continues in just 60 seconds. On our podcast, Clocket, we are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics. Clocket is where we talk about what we see in here in the news so you can start a clocket too. Clocket with some only new gene.
All episodes available now. There's a special report on Trump's coup plot and how it looks worse when you view all the evidence together with the plotters aware their plan was illegal. And by the time this all ended, they were seeking pardons, which are for criminals, completing the fifth. Dr Eastman emailed Rudy Giuliani and requested that he be included on a list of potential recipients of the presidential pardon.
I certainly didn't have a right against that being held to be a witness against myself. Did Rudy Giuliani ever suggest that he was interested in receiving a presidential pardon related to January 6th? He did. Ms.
Meadows did seek that pardon. Key point. Many of those people wanted pardons totally separate from the January 6th violence. And that is important as we look at a different plot.
Trump's effort to get a coup planner who would go farther than Giuliani, his lawyer, Sidney Powell, she would go even farther. So the plan was to take her off the campaign team and try to install her inside the government to get the military to seize voting machines, an illegal order that several lawyers warned could land, them and even Trump in prison. So here Trump turned to the more standard approach to a coup that we see in so many parts of world history, try to abuse the military. Now military leaders have said and veterans have said that generals would refuse this kind of order to get soldiers to seize voting machines, just like they've refused an order to say bomb the opposing party's headquarters, a point that was also made in a White House meeting described as a nutty screaming mess.
What they were proposing, I thought was a nut, Sidney Powell was fighting, my plan was fighting, this isn't a sweep that I was a quitter. Trump did back down on that very bad red illegal plan, and by the way quitting an illegal coup would be a good thing, but this was the military plot, another conspiracy's prong that hits a dead end. And this is key because facing that dead end late that same night of December 18th, Trump turned to the other plot pushed by Eastman and Navarro, posting what is a now infamous tweet that announces the January 6th rally beginning quote, Peter Navarro releases 36 page report alleging election fraud more than sufficient to swing victory to Trump. That was a lie Trump needed to build on and then he summons the people to DC for the first time quote, big protest in DC on January 6th will be wild.
Now that's the first time Trump ever told supporters there was a place to come join this fight and none of this happened in isolation. The evidence of Trump's criminal intent is worse when all the facts are shown about the plot. So let's take a look. Trump began the public operation to sabotage January 6th as a certified vote, which was criminal only after hitting this dead end in the failed plot to have the military help the coup.
Now his lawyers warned him of the criminal issues here, the criminal intent and actions of that military plot. And he still moved continuously from that conspiracy to this one. Now that's damning evidence if prosecutors are indicting a broader conspiracy. And the White House aide connecting both plots is Navarro, who's aid helped sneak in the military plotters there.
Then he's part of Trump's January 6th announcement. It begins with a Navarro plan, and it's notable Navarro spots so hard to hide his own evidence and testimony while trying to spin his own role. Even he began denying any involvement in the plot about the military seizing voting machines, which he actually used to push in public. And was it a bad idea or wrong to pursue the military to seize American voting machines?
I would like to get more to the bottom of. That's not something that I would have put forward by any stretch of the imagination. I think we need a special counsel that we put in place before an augmentation day to get to the bottom of this. I think we need to seize a lot of those voting machines.
Special counsel Powell seized voting machines through the military. He was pushing that in public. Now as Trump moved from that voting machine's idea, which did hit another brick wall, to this emphasis on January 6th, you get to that other plot to get the Pence plan going. And this intensified lawyers arguing that Mike Pence could abuse his ceremonial role not just to open the votes on the six, but quote, to count them.
They argued Pence would be the ultimate arbiter, a point that Trump advocated in public and that the evidence suggests would be discussed when he then held a meeting with Republican lawmakers on December 21st for hours about what they would do. Those plots are the context for Trump seeking DOJ interference with what I will say was an absurd kind of last ditch conspiracy, where a more junior DOJ official, Mr. Clark, who's had his home searched, was then demanding that while they just get the whole DOJ to tell Georgia legislators come back into session and toss their own voters decision back and by. Now very few people think that would have worked, but the reason it failed was because the DOJ resisted.
Pat Siplon said, yeah, this is a murder suicide pact. I'm resigned immediately. The president immediately turned to Mr. Angle and he said, Steve, you wouldn't resign, would you?
And he said, absolutely, I wouldn't. You get hundreds and hundreds of resignations of the leadership of your entire Justice Department if Clark would be left leading a graveyard. So DOJ interference, a bust, another plot running out of steam, which matters for how you approach the whole conspiracy. Trump thought DOJ would somehow help strong arm the states, but even without them, he pressed on with this brazen authoritarian plan, where he actually talked to hundreds of state legislators on January 2nd, desperately proclaiming they would be the real power and they could cancel their own citizens' votes.
If that's familiar, it relates to something else under investigation, but that might make more sense together than separate, because he demanded Georgia's top elections official join him in a kind of voter fraud. This, remember all the arrows? This is on the same day as the call of the state legislators. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more that we have.
So that was trying to get states to overturn. So you have these seven plots we mentioned in the report, and then you have the US Congress. States rejected Trump's demands. We do know that.
Even very red states, Trump was left then pushing what was, operationally, an incomplete conspiracy, but a conspiracy nonetheless, because as the states found, the Congress would be faced with the same sort of menu. There wasn't really public evidence or even a decent political pretext for just rejecting their own citizens' votes. But the plan here was hoping that Congress or Pence would do what others wouldn't, where other plots failed, and they would just come in and falsely lie or claim Biden lost. This is the coup or the so-called sweep that some plotters assert was completely distinct from any violence on January 6th.
The plan was simply this. We had over 100 congressmen and senators on Capitol Hill ready to implement the sweep. Jim Jordan and Matt Gates, who are always stepping forward. But briefing them, I'm going to have a session today.
You've got Ted Cruz, you've got Lindsey Graham, you've got Tom Cotton from Harvard Law School, you've got some heavies over in the Senate. I'm sorry when this is Mark Medell, I told him can you go back and ask a couple of them, Tom Cotton. The remedy was for Vice President Pence's and the quarterback and the Green Bay Suite to remand those votes back to the 6th battleground states. The Vice President's got a lot of power, and that's very important to recognize.
Are we to assume that this is going to be a climactic battle that's going to take place this week about the very question of the constitutionalality of the electoral account of 1877? Well, I think a lot of that depends on the courage and the spine of the individuals involved. Vice President Mike Pence, I don't know. Do you realize you are describing a coup?
No. And that's where these three plots actually go hand in hand. Trump intended any of them to hopefully work in his mind, but ideally they would work together, get the states or Congress or Pence to lie and declare that they're overthrowing the vote. Now under the rules, there actually is a way this could have gone much farther or even to a standoff with two dueling president-elects.
This is not a movie, this is not fan fiction. It's vital to understand for preventing it from happening in the future. I'll explain how and why after this rate. Now, I'm going to go ahead and subscribe to MS Now Premium on Apple Podcasts.
Welcome back to our special report inside Trump's election plot. And now we turn to something absolutely harrowing that is actually discussed less. For all the information about January 6, it is rare to hear what the actual ending was supposed to look like according to the people trying to steal the election. Coup plotters like Navarro and Eastman planned more than chaos.
We have the evidence on that. The goal was to claim to prevent a standard certification and then get to a rare but actually possible measure where a contested presidential race would be resolved by a congressional vote. Now, if you're thinking, well, Democrats won the House, so why would they want that? They actually plotted this out and they knew something that is very relevant to the future of American democracy.
When you get this very unlikely but possible measure to resolve a contested election, that congressional vote can be measured by state where Republicans actually have the edge. So had they succeeded, Republicans then would have had the chance to claim, at least make the argument that Trump had won by a House vote because even in a democratically controlled House, they would, as of January 21, have the advantage when you count by state. Political scientists Clarence Hussein wrote about this in the Washington Post. Republicans have more votes because the vote is done with one vote per state, not districts.
Now, whether all of that is immediately digestible on first constitutional explanation or not is I think an open question. But my point to you is, and this sometimes is obscured. If you look at all the plots together, there was a mechanism where they would potentially win, particularly if the Supreme Court allowed it. They never got to that point, which goes to what did go down on January 6.
All those failed plots, all that desperation leading to Donald Trump's fixation on one of the last red arrows, getting Mike Pence to attempt to coup. If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election. I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do. And Trump kept pushing Pence on this as late as January 4, and those other unlawful plots were re-emerging as a kind of pretext, even though, as you've seen, they didn't all work.
Indeed, Senate Republicans were trying to get that fraudulent electoral material to Pence on that very day, with Pence's aid pushing back. Don't give him that. That's the electoral fraud stuff. This was, as you see on your screen, within roughly 20 minutes of Mike Pence arriving, and over 130 Republicans did vote to object to the certification, including eight Republican senators.
So these different disparate plots are not disparate. They all congeal. And then you have Trump sending what he knew were armed people to the Capitol at a point where he knew he needed something more than all of those other seven-footed plots he tried. I overheard the president say something, Steve, I don't know.
I think they have weapons. They're not here to hurt me, take that thing back away, let my people in. We're going to walk down, and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down to the Capitol because you'll never take back our country with weakness.
The Capitol was breached at 2 p.m. The committee probe has shown this last plot was working. I repeat, it was literally working. The plot was to sabotage the certification by prevention or delay.
It was delayed. In fact, law enforcement predicted it would take days more delay before Congress could even certify the vote. Days, that's how close it came. Now, Congress did not certify this current president Biden on January 6th as provided in the Constitution.
It was 3 40 a.m. the next day. But people didn't wake up with that finality. What if it took longer?
What if the nation woke up on January 7th with no certified winner? What if an operational attack did achieve the goal that Trump apparently had to make that last days? And then President Trump at the time would be able to say there really was an open question, even according to the constitutional process, about who won because it hadn't been certified. And what if the Supreme Court then did take one of the Trump cases that had previously rejected?
These are real questions. Our report's conclusion is next. Welcome back to the conclusion of our report on the Trump coup conspiracy. We've gone through a lot of evidence in our special for you.
And I just want to make sure we're clear on what we've learned, what we found, because all that starts here with lawsuits, that's the right of any candidate to file, even if they are frivolous. And this elector plot starts in green because ultimately people do have the ability to set up these electors, right? It became criminal later and we'll get into that. But as you watch this go over time, what you see here is everything that was brainstormed as possibly maybe somehow legal gives way to the illicit intent.
Congress overturning votes, states overturning votes, Pence overturning votes. Any one of those things has been making of a coup if it cancels an election, almost sounds obvious. But they are worse taken together. The military is using voting machines, this key point.
This is something that Rudy Giuliani said would land them all in prison. Rudy Giuliani. He's already lost his law license. We'll see what else happens to him.
But that is the context as we show tonight, that when that fails is the first time the same night that Donald Trump comes in and says, all right, I can't abuse military power. I'm even being told by my most aggressive lawless lawyers, the kind that he apparently prefers, that that's not going to work. So that's when I bring muscle to January 6th. But we have had in this country, in our minds and apparently at the Justice Department, as we reported tonight, a fixation on only looking here on basically the 6th or the lead up to the 6th or a few days out.
And that's understandable given what we lived through where human beings and the 6th was one of the worst attacks and the worst national security crises America has ever faced from a domestic threat, let alone an incumbent outgoing president. The point tonight, which we've built on evidence, not anything but evidence, is that when you actually go all the way back, when you actually understand how this started and how many different plots were pursued, forwarded, warned about, and then desperately doubled down upon, that goes to the criminal intent. Let me put it simply, taken separately, some of these plots can be viewed like a gray area, clumsy plans that didn't occur or the insurrection that exploded but also ended within one day. I'll tell you something, the law makes it hard to pin an insurrection on one speech, as it should.
But taken together, you have the evidence of this wider criminal conspiracy, with criminal intent running across weeks if not more. Remember, and court prosecutors have to prove criminal intent in a moment, just that you're meant to do it. This is weeks of that, with lawyers warning these were crimes, especially after the legal doors closed in mid-December, when the electoral college voted. Everything after that, when it comes to overturning votes and installing fraudulent electors, that's that illegal red zone.
That's where you see the evidence of several crimes. And taken together, well, this evidence suggests the question is no longer whether there are any indictable election offenses here, but how prosecutors would explain a failure to indict and enforce the law, and how that does risk letting the close call of this documented and attempted multi-prong coup conspiracy turn into a training exercise that American democracy may not survive. We have some expert legal analysis to get into what the justice department and other prosecutors are doing when our special concludes after this short break. Welcome back to our Beat Special Report inside Trump's election plot.
Now we turn to NYU law professor and former judicial clerk Melissa Murray. She has been with us throughout the hour and she joins us now for her perspective. Thanks for being here. Thanks so much for having me back in the studio together.
Together. First, I emphasize something we all know, which is this started with a fixation legally and otherwise on this single day. What does it mean to broaden out and look at it as a joint conspiracy? So I think this is incredibly helpful to have this longitudinal look at everything that happened from the time the election was conducted all the way through to January 6th, because I think the last site of the language, all of this was linked up.
So you have these lawsuits, we talked about these lawsuits while they were happening in real time. We saw those end very unfermoniously for the former president in courts. And then I think it's nice to see like this is the logical outgrowth of those defeats in the court. They turn to other means.
Some of these means are more fanciful than others, and then they ultimately culminate in this true Hail Mary assault on the Capitol. Right. And so things that did look desperate, even absurd or done for the quote audience of one at the time behind the scenes actually did connect. So let's put our reporting up back on the screen.
We're going to see these plots. Red is what is unlawful unconstitutional and potentially criminal. I think we'll go in on the red a little if we can. I'm curious if you can tell us, what does it mean?
Yes, as we look here, what does it mean that after the electoral college votes in December, you have multiple red lines that were designed to overthrow the results? So this to me is perhaps the most alarming part of this entire plot, because this is an effort to use the Constitution to actually use legitimate legal means for the purpose of overthrowing a democratically conducted election. So we see these lawsuits fail, and then there's this immediate pivot. We're going to either seize the voting machines using the Department of Justice using the military.
Failing that, we're going to pressure the vice president and we're going to tell him that he has the constitutional authority to reject the slates of electors and to install alternate electors. And then what we're really seeing in the mistrulies he's alarming thing for me is that what saves us here is that there are individuals, former judge Michael Ludig, who tells Vice President Pence, like that's not within the scope of your brief. Like you can't do that as Vice President. People like, that's illegal, Mr.
Vice President, don't do it. That is not what the Constitution says, that is not what the Constitution permits, but until those individuals step in and intervene, you have this group of lawyers arguing that this is completely permissible under the Constitution. They are interpreting the Constitution to effectively allow for a coup to happen. They're legitimizing a coup.
Right, which is very chilling. How you define the scope can determine or cabin narrow everything else. Look at the arrows again, we'll put up one more time here when you actually look at the right side and you look at the sabotage of January 6 overlapping with all these other things. We had a whole impeachment professor about whether a speech incites that last arrow, sabotage January 6.
If you only look at that last arrow, you're already narrow, even if that was terrible. What does it mean when you stack the other arrows, and then I invite you to give us the counterpoint. Why is it sometimes hard to prove criminal intent? So this, I think, is actually really important.
So when we had that second Trump impeachment, all we were looking at was the mob violence at the Capitol and whether or not the President had incited it and whether that equated to a high crime or misdemeanor sufficient to impeach a former president. But when you look at all of these things layered on top of each other, this is a multi-pronged effort to keep this one individual in power. And I think that's the gift of the January 6 committee in this investigation. You're finally able to see how all of these things stack on top of each other, and that they're all part of a joined up effort, some might say a conspiracy, to bring all of this into fruition to stop the actual outcome of a democratically conducted election.
A prosecutor might say a conspiracy. A prosecutor might say a conspiracy. Again, there are a lot of prudential reasons why a particular prosecutor, maybe one at Merrick Garland, might bulk at prosecuting the person at the center of all of this, Donald J. Trump, and I think there are real questions of intent, whether he actually undertook all of this with the kind of intent that's required to establish some of these criminal statutes beyond a reason.
So I just want to say in fairness, what you're emphasizing is, one, sometimes it's hard to prove the criminal intent, so you don't have the case, or two, you do have the case. I mean, there's a lot of evidence we showed tonight that hits people like Eastman who were behind it. But for prudential reasons, you don't go up to a former president. As you say, that means you have the criminal evidence, but you have a hard decision to make.
I think people have heard about that. Before I lose you here at the end of our special, you raised the point where I want to give you time for it, because you said, while these arrows end with this plot, there are other open efforts to have normalized coups in court. Explain. So the green arrow that we talked about the lawsuits, which stop abruptly when the courts' dismiss these lawsuits as frivolous, I think that's the really important part.
These lawsuits, I'm thinking particularly of the lawsuit launched by Texas AG Ken Paxton, really advanced this theory called the independent state legislature theory, the idea that states like Pennsylvania had allowed these other bodies, state courts, state boards of electors to change election rules to allow for these votes. And they violated this principle that is essentially, according to this theory, part of the Constitution, that only state legislatures can change these rules. The court, the Supreme Court in taking up Texas versus Pennsylvania, dismissed that lawsuit because they said Texas lacked jurisdiction to sue Pennsylvania. They never took up the substance of whether this independent state legislature theory was actually meritorious.
Coming up in this next Supreme Court term, that's exactly what the court is going to take up in a case called Moore versus Harper. So we're going to find out if in fact the Constitution tells us that state legislatures are the exclusive and ultimate arbiter of election rules. And that's huge. It's a great point you raised, and to your point, you're saying that this Supreme Court could put a thumb on the scale to help states at a time where states are the one place where Republicans think they have this advantage based on population disparities and not necessarily reflect the national election.
I got to invite you back to a big episode at 6PM Eastern. Happy to do it. Because now we're out of time. Professor, thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I want to thank you for spending time with us in this special. Our point here is to look at the evidence and understand why.
If you have that feeling that sometimes we talk so much about that important insurrection, but we don't get to the wider, larger question of whether American democracy is going to survive, well, these are some of the reasons. Whether the people in charge in government and prosecutors, and yes, us, we, if I may be so idealistic, we the citizenry, look at this as the full threat that it is, is an open question for whether we can address it. Thanks for spending time with us. As I mentioned, you can always see me, Melissa, and many more people on the beat week, nights at 6PM Eastern.
And for right now, please keep it locked right here on MSNBC. We are positioning ourselves at the intersection of culture and politics. Clock it is where we talk about what we see in here on the news so you can start a clock it too. Clock it with some only new gene.
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