Why today's Jan. 6 revelations will be dangerous for Trump

[Nevilledog]

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Will Saletan
@saletan
Some apologists think Trump's election lies were innocent because he truly thought he'd won.

Nope, says @ThePlumLineGS. He quotes @BarbMcQuade: “If you close your eyes to the high probability that a fact exists, you can’t use that to evade responsibility”

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Why today’s Jan. 6 revelations will be dangerous for Trump
It's critical to expose the throbbing core of premeditated corruption that drove Trump's coup attempt.
6:15 PM · Jun 13, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/13/jan-6-committee-hearing-dangerous-trump/

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https://archive.ph/oqF0H

As we prepare for Monday’s committee hearing on the Jan. 6 insurrection, it’s worth dwelling on the legal concept of “willful blindness.” Under it, deliberate ignorance of a particular fact does not constitute exoneration if there was a high — and obvious — probability that this fact was true.

The fact in question, for our purposes, is this: “Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden.” Trump knew this, yet tried to overturn the result anyway, an effort that culminated in the violent assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Trump has continued insisting the election was stolen from him. This has functioned for Trump and his apologists as a form of exoneration: He genuinely believed that to be the case and merely exercised whatever legal options he thought were available in response.

But this story will implode at the House select committee hearing on Monday. It will focus on Trump’s “big lie” about his loss, and how it underpinned his weeks-long attempt to overturn the outcome. Central to this will be showing that Trump did know he had lost before launching that effort.

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