Last week’s Congressional hearings were as riveting and disturbing as any testimony that has ever occurred in the US Congress. The picture has now become much sharper and much uglier about the true danger on January 6, the wild scheme to overturn the election that built for months, the fact that the plot was occurring at the highest levels of government, and most of all that President Donald Trump was told repeatedly, in the words of the former Attorney General of the United States William Barr, that his false election claims and the illegal scheme to keep him in power were all “b******t.” And yet, he tried to stage a coup anyway. In fact, perhaps most surprising, the January 6 attack may not even matter when comes down to the question of whether Donald Trump will be prosecuted.
We unpack all of this with Barbara McQuade, a law professor at the University of Michigan and the former U.S attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan – the first woman to serve in her position. She’s also a legal analyst for NBC News and MSNBC. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Lawfare, Just Security, Slate, and NPR.
