Liz Cheney Nukes the Supreme Court—With an Urgent Warning About Trump

The Jan. 6 committee wanted to question Scavino about exactly this, among other things, but could not. Smith surely has done so.

All this information would presumably come out at trial, which considerably raises the stakes around a potential Supreme Court delay. Consider that those who deny that Jan. 6 was an insurrection often seek to create the impression that there were two separate narrative lines leading up to that day: the procedural coup, in which Trump sought to corrupt government officials at all levels to scuttle the official transfer of power, and the mob violence. In this telling, the mob wasn’t all that directed by Trump; it just got out of control, and wasn’t particularly motivated toward realizing any concrete project. Hence, no insurrection.

In reality, those narratives are part of the same story: Trump saw the mob violence as the weapon to complete the procedural coup once it had failed him on every other front. He incited and directed it toward that precise end.