New email reinforces Trump team saw ‘wild’ Jan. 6 unrest as leverage

As Philip Bump notes, the combination of these two things could be less than meets the eye. We don’t know when Ginni Thomas and Eastman corresponded — i.e., whether it was before Dec. 24 — or what they corresponded about. And it’s possible Eastman was blowing smoke, elevating a popular internet rumor about tensions within the Supreme Court as if he had special insight. The question is certainly worth probing, but it’s not at all clear that Eastman had some kind of leaked information about the Supreme Court’s deliberations.

Indeed, it might be the third revelation that’s the most intriguing when it comes to the central questions for the Jan. 6 committee.

In the same Times story, Luke Broadwater and Maggie Haberman reported that another Trump-aligned lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, suggested that “‘wild’ chaos” on Jan. 6 could suit the purposes of their legal effort.

And it’s far from the only evidence that Trump and his allies viewed violence or the threat of it as leverage.

According to the report, Eastman advocated for submitting a petition for certiorari in hopes of spurring a supposedly tense Supreme Court to act. Chesebro responded by suggesting that a certain factor might tip the scales for the justices to intervene.

Chesebro responded: “I think the odds of action before Jan. 6 will become more favorable if the justices start to fear that there will be ‘wild’ chaos on Jan. 6 unless they rule by then, either way.”

Chesebro’s use of the word “wild” in quotation marks is particularly conspicuous. Just five days earlier, on Dec. 19, Trump had promoted a protest in Washington on Jan. 6 by saying, “Be there. Will be wild!” It’s pretty evident that Chesebro used “chaos” to refer to the protests, and not to the lawmakers objecting to the election results.

Again, there’s plenty we don’t know. And Chesebro, we should emphasize, suggested not just that “‘wild’ chaos” could spur the court to act, but could push it also to decide against the Trump legal team.

“Though that factor could go against us on the merits,” he wrote. “Easiest way to quell chaos would be to rule against us — our side would accept that result as legitimate.”

But the fact remains that Chesebro appeared to be talking about the prospect of unrest as leverage. Also important: He seemed to be well aware that Trump was at the very least toying with the prospect of much more than a peaceful protest.

And it wouldn’t be the first evidence that they viewed such threats as leverage.

For one, there are several indicators that when the violence broke out, Trump viewed it as justified or even approved of it:

• Multiple GOP lawmakers and reports have described a remarkable level of callousness from Trump toward those who faced danger.
• That includes allegedly telling House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.”
• He tweeted disparagingly about Vice President Mike Pence, accusing him of inaction, even as the Capitol had been stormed — despite apparently knowing that fact. And, according to the Jan. 6 committee, there’s evidence Trump even spoke of how Pence deserved to be targeted by the mob.
• After the insurrection ended, Trump intoned, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

As William Saletan wrote, there’s also the tenor of Trump’s comments during the riot. While it took him more than two hours to tell his supporters to go home, he did previously tell them to remain peaceful. Saletan pointed to a potential conclusion — that Trump wanted them to remain in the Capitol to serve as leverage:

The simplest answer is that, as his prior behavior demonstrated, he saw the mob as leverage in a last-ditch effort to overturn the election. He had summoned his followers to Washington to pressure Congress to halt the certification of the election, and the pressure had succeeded. If he were to disperse the mob — not just ask it to curtail its violence — he would lose his leverage. So, for nearly two hours, he held out. That’s what the texts are showing us: that the president was being asked to make a specific concession, and that he refused to do so.

That’s speculative, but we also know that many Republicans were telling Trump to go further to quell the violence — even after his “remain peaceful” tweets — and that he clearly resisted doing so.

Finally, Eastman’s own emails afterward. Eastman didn’t back off trying to overturn the election; indeed, he tried to use the mob attack to get Pence to block the confirmation of Joe Biden’s win on a technicality. The mob had forced Congress to spend more than the allotted two hours in reviewing the results, Eastman argued, and had thus already violated the Electoral Count Act standing in the Trump team’s way.

The picture of the whole thing is already extremely dangerous, callous and brazen — at the very least. The growing question is how much it was part of a concerted plot — how much people viewed the potential for violence, or the violence itself, as a bargaining chip in their attempt to overturn the election.

That is central to the committee’s efforts to argue that Trump broke the law by corruptly interfering with Congress’s actions on Jan. 6. Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the committee, said last week that the “the violence was no accident” and that it was “the culmination of an attempted coup.”

And Chesebro, for one, seemed to understand in advance both the potential for the protest becoming “wild” that day — and its possible utility.