The Morning Dispatch: Democrats Make Their Case

Happy Thursday! As those of you who’ve listened to any of our recent podcast offerings will know, we’re having lots of discussions internally about how to best cover President Trump now that he is no longer in office.

There’s plenty of clickbait nonsense we’ve kept out of the pages of TMD in recent weeks. The impeachment trial—even though the eventual outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion—is not that. There have been four of these in American history. The trial this week will set not only the direction of the Republican Party for the foreseeable future, but also a precedent about whether what happened January 6—and in the weeks leading up to that day—is acceptable. It’s important, and we’re going to continue to cover it until it ends, likely next week.

Now, to the news.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Rank and file members of the Chicago Teachers Union voted two-to-one in favor of a deal with Chicago Public Schools that would have students back in classrooms on a staggered basis as early as today. Pre-K and special education programs are set to return to in-person learning Thursday, while elementary and middle school students will be allowed to return over the next three weeks.*

• A new study published by the Centers for Disease Control yesterday found that wearing a more tight-fitting surgical mask—or a second cloth mask over a surgical mask—can dramatically reduce transmission of COVID-19, protecting both the wearer and those around them.

• President Joe Biden said Wednesday his administration will impose new sanctions on the military leaders who led Myanmar’s coup earlier this month, freezing the generals out of $1 billion in U.S.-based assets.

• Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said yesterday the Fed will continue to maintain low interest rates in an effort to shore up the economy.

• The United States confirmed 91,587 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 7.2 percent of the 1,268,089 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 3,274 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 471,377. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 76,979 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 1,563,780 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, bringing the nationwide total to 44,769,970.

Impeachment Managers Make Their Case

If the House impeachment managers’ goal on Tuesday was to make the case for the constitutionality of the impeachment trial, the goal of their presentation yesterday was to make the case for conviction.

Unlike President Trump’s first impeachment trial, the jurors didn’t really need to be brought up to speed on the broad contours of the case before them: They all lived it. The impeachment managers showcased some new material on Wednesday, but the bulk of the day focused on laying out a clear and concise timeline of exactly what took place on January 6—and the former president’s role in it.

Arguments lasted nearly eight hours, wrapping up just before 8 p.m. ET, but the managers’ case boiled down to three relatively simple points:

1. President Trump’s lies about the election—both on January 6 and in the weeks leading up to it—inspired the mob that attacked the Capitol last month;

2. That attack on the Capitol was very nearly even more deadly than it ended up being; and

3. President Trump abdicated his responsibility as commander in chief by not doing everything he could to stop the violence once it began.

We’ve detailed extensively the false statements and claims Trump and his allies in right-wing media made following the former president’s loss to Joe Biden. “In the months as the president made these statements,” Rep. Joe Neguse, a Democrat from Colorado, argued yesterday, “people listened.”

“Armed supporters surrounded election officials’ homes. The secretary of state for Georgia got death threats. Officials warned the president that his rhetoric was dangerous and it was going to result in deadly violence,” he continued. “When he saw firsthand the violence that his conduct was creating, he didn’t stop it. He didn’t condemn the violence. He incited it further and he got more specific. He didn’t just tell them to fight like hell. He told them how, where, and when.”

“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted on December 19. “Be there, will be wild!”

Once the crowd was assembled, Trump did nothing but raise the temperature, the managers argued. “If you don’t fight like Hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he shouted, instructing his fans to walk down to the Capitol and “show strength.”

“Show strength” the mob did, wholly overpowering a U.S. Capitol Police Force unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with thousands of angry and violent rioters headed their way. The impeachment managers relied heavily on audio and visual footage to remind senators of the horrors that transpired; Sen. James Lankford at one point appeared to tear up watching the mob attack a police officer.

Much of the footage presented yesterday was recycled from the managers’ introductory video from Tuesday, but House Democrats presented new evidence as well. Security footage of Officer Eugene Goodman running into Sen. Mitt Romney in a hallway and redirecting him away from the rioters. Radio dispatches between obviously distressed Capitol police officers reporting “multiple law enforcement injuries” and that they’ve “been flanked” and “lost the line.” Members of Congress evacuating the chamber just feet from where a police officer was holding a rioter at gunpoint. A video of staffers for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi barricading themselves in a conference room just minutes before the rioters—shouting “where are you, Nancy?”—reach their office. Vice President Pence being ushered to a secure location with his family while a mob chanting “hang Mike Pence!” was less than 100 feet away.

The implication was clear: Events were stunningly close to being so, so much worse.

From there, the impeachment managers turned their attention to Trump’s conduct once the rioters were inside the Capitol. “The facts are that on January 6, Donald Trump did not once condemn this attack,” said Rep. David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island. “He did not once condemn the attackers. On January 6, the only person he condemned was his own vice president, Mike Pence, who was hiding in this building with his family, in fear for his life.”

Trump did—at 2:38 p.m. ET, hours after the mob first breached the Capitol—tweet that everyone there should “stay peaceful.” At 3:13 p.m. ET, he told his supporters to “respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue.” But those initial statements, which did not include any condemnations, were only sent after hours of pleading from current and former aides.

Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly got into a screaming match on the phone with Trump, trying to convince him—unsuccessfully, for a while—to release a statement.

“Condemn this now, @realDonaldTrump – you are the only one they will listen to,” his former communications adviser Alyssa Farah tweeted at 2:54 p.m ET. “For our country!”

Barricaded in his office at 3:11 p.m. ET that afternoon, GOP Rep. Mike Gallagher implored Trump to do the right thing. “Mr. President: You have got to stop this. You are the only person who can call this off. Call it off! The election is over. Call it off.”

Cicilline used contemporaneous reporting to speculate about why it took Trump so long to issue the statements. “The president, as reported by sources at the time, was ‘delighted’ as he watched the violence unfold on television,” the Rhode Island Democrat said. “Sen. Ben Sasse relayed a conversation with senior White House officials that President Trump was ‘walking around the White House confused about why other people on his team weren’t as excited as he was.’ Trump’s reaction to this attack reportedly, genuinely, freaked people out.”

Trump’s “singular focus that day,” Cicilline said, “was not protecting us, it was not protecting you, it was not protecting the Capitol. It was stopping the certification of the election results.”

Nothing makes this more apparent than the fact that, around 2 p.m. ET on January 6, Trump called Sen. Mike Lee—intending to reach Sen. Tommy Tuberville. Lee, who happened to be sheltering with Tuberville as the rioters marauded through the Capitol, handed the phone to Tuberville. Trump talked to the Alabama senator for five to 10 minutes, reportedly about the electoral objections. Tuberville told reporters yesterday that he relayed to the president on the call that Pence was being evacuated from the chamber for his safety. But moments later Trump, rather than calling on the attackers to stand down or vowing to send reinforcements, at 2:24 p.m attacked his vice president on Twitter, effectively egging the rioters on.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump wrote.

The attackers were listening. The House Managers played a series of video clips later in the day showing the attackers reading Trump’s tweets almost as instructions. At one point, a rioter conveyed the contents of the tweet about Pence over a bullhorn to the rampaging crowd.

Many Republicans once again conceded that the impeachment managers argued their case well. 

“I think they’ve done a good job connecting the dots,” Sen. John Thune said. “The President’s Twitter feed is a matter of public record and they’ve done, like I said, an effective job of going back several months and just showing that public record.”

But Republicans remain confident that nowhere near the 17 GOP senators necessary to secure a conviction will vote to do so.

South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott predicted there would end up being five or six votes to convict Trump—at a maximum.

“Their focus is on the actions of the day and they have still to reckon with the fact that most of us don’t believe we have the constitutional authority to impeach a private person,” Sen. Mike Rounds said of he and his GOP colleagues. “I don’t think they’re going to be able to overcome that based on the direction of their discussions today, as chilling as the events of Jan. 6 were.” 

There’s Something in the Water

Early last Friday, an operator at the Oldsmar, Florida water treatment plant watched as someone else took control of his computer virtually and manipulated the cursor around his screen. When the mysterious force moved to increase the water supply’s levels of sodium hydroxide—commonly known as lye, the primary ingredient in liquid drain cleaner—from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million, the employee quickly reversed the adjustment and notified authorities of a breach.

Using infiltrated TeamViewer software, which allows treatment facility personnel and IT professionals to access operational technology systems remotely, a hacker of unknown origins had attempted to poison the water supply of 15,000 Oldsmar residents located in Pinellas County. 

“This is somebody that is trying, it appears on the surface, to do something bad,” said Bob Gualtieri, the county’s sheriff, during a press conference Monday. “We don’t know right now whether the breach originated from within the United States or outside the country. We also do not know why the Oldsmar system was targeted and we have no knowledge of any other systems being unlawfully accessed.”

In small amounts, lye can be used in the treatment process to remove metals from the water supply and reduce its acidity. But Friday’s breach constituted a “significant and potentially dangerous increase,” according to Gualtieri. The county assured that, even if the employee had not observed the hack, additional safeguards were in place to prevent unsafe drinking water from reaching the city’s population.

“I want to make a point and that is: The monitoring protocols we have in place, they work. That’s the good news,” said Oldsmar Mayor Eric Seidel. “Even had they not caught them, there’s redundancies that have alarms in the system that would have caught the change in the pH level anyhow.”

“The important thing is to put everyone on notice,” Seidel continued. “These kinds of bad actors are out there.”

Cyber attacks on infrastructure are not new, and they have grown in frequency over the past several years. A water reservoir in Israel, for example, was targeted last April when a hacker gained access to two treatment systems and increased the water chlorine levels in an effort to poison the local population. Like the Oldsmar water treatment plant, the two facilities were breached because of their use of internet-connected equipment.

Foreign intelligence officials, according to a Washington Post report, attributed the attack on the Israeli reservoir to Iran. Over the summer, Iran suffered its own series of infrastructure breaches, potentially retaliatory in nature.

But whether the infiltration into Florida’s critical infrastructure was the work of foreign state actors or domestic hackers is “impossible to say at this point,” said Chris Finan, a former Obama administration cybersecurity official, now Chief Operating Officer at ActZero, a cybersecurity provider. “The skills and tools required to execute this attack are common.”

It is also possible the attempted poisoning was an inside job. “It’s very likely that was a disgruntled employee,” former Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs told the Wall Street Journal. “It is also possible it was a foreign actor. This is why we do investigations.” 

Local forensic units, the FBI, and Secret Service are now working to trace the attack’s digital footprint in an effort to uncover the assailant.

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to the incident during a press briefing Tuesday, saying “the president, the vice president, members of our national security team are focused on elevating cybersecurity as a threat that has only increased over the past several years.”

Attacks will only increase as more and more critical infrastructure becomes connected to the internet. “Municipal governments are increasingly being targeted, principally for extortion by criminal groups demanding ransoms,” Finan told The Dispatch. “Holding critical infrastructure systems at risk—by threat or demonstration—can be an extortive tactic.”

“It’s a public and private sector issue that affects every level of government and size of business,” he continued. “The decentralized nature of these systems (and owners) makes accountability for their proper protection very difficult. There’s no central authority responsible for safeguarding them. Many of these systems are not properly protected, and there’s no effective national oversight.”

Worth Your Time

• It is often said that the modern era’s fusionism between libertarians and traditionalist conservatives has its historical roots in the Cold War, when both movements decided they could overlook their differences because of their shared opposition to communism. But did the fall of the Soviet Union doom this so-called marriage of convenience between seemingly oppositional value sets? Fusionism, ReasonMagazine’s managing editor Stephanie Slade writes, “has long been running on fumes,” especially as the post-liberalism movement has gained ground within the more religious and traditionalist circles of the right. But Slade also argues that much of this shift has to do with the fact that people misunderstand what fusionism really is. “An arrangement in which traditionalists and libertarians are merely allies can easily become a game of tug of war in which each side jockeys to ensure that, on balance, its own priorities predominate. If one side finds itself too often on the losing end of that jockeying, it might reasonably move to dissolve the alliance altogether,” she notes.

• When we reflect on the dramatic toll this past year has inflicted upon our social lives, we often do so in clinical and inhumane terms, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes in his latest for National Review. “We feel we are allowed to speak of the ‘mental-health effects’ of lockdowns, closures, and the fear-driven lack of sociability on ourselves and our children,” he writes. “But when we do, we talk about ourselves like lab animals, as if we were neutral observers of our lives.”It’s been a year since many of us have seen our co-workers, our grandparents, or old friends. FaceTime and texting have made this year bearable, but they’ve also reminded us of the incomparable nature of face-to-face interaction with loved ones. “Personally, the last year has fortified my conviction that life cannot be lived via screens, and that the summer — when it comes — should be filled with big get-togethers, the opening of expensive and long-stored bottles of whisky, and many hot tears over what we’ve lost.”

• On January 19, the Oregon GOP voted in favor of a resolution calling the Capitol insurrection a “false flag.” Allen West, Chairman of the Republican Party of Texas, has expressed support for a resolution that would allow citizens to vote on whether the Lone Star state ought to secede from the union. The Illinois GOP recently censured Rep. Adam Kinzinger for voting to impeach Donald Trump. Why does it seem like so many state Republican Parties are taking crazy pills? “The GOP’s electoral failures should produce some soul searching. At the very least, we should see the voters who support Republican policies demand better representation from their respective parties,” writes Noah Rothman in Commentary. “But we haven’t seen that. Maybe Republican voters aren’t all that interested in winning elections anymore. If so, state parties are delivering.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Also Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Wednesday’s episode of the Dispatch Podcast drills down on all things impeachment: Its constitutionality, the mechanics of the Senate trial, the persuasiveness of Trump’s defense team, and the political ramifications. Stick around to hear our hosts chat about what National Pizza Day means to them—and the revelation that is Goldbelly.

• In his Wednesday G-File (🔒), Jonah walks us through the latest speech-policing fiasco at the New York Times and segues into a discussion about former President Donald Trump’s First Amendment defense strategy during his second impeachment trial. “The Times wants to criminalize language regardless of context—figuratively speaking—and Trump’s lawyers want to absolve crimes—or high crimes and misdemeanors—involving words, regardless of context,” Jonah writes. “Can’t we all just be frickin’ grown-ups and expect everyone else to behave like adults, too?”

• Be sure to also check out Scott Lincicome’s latest Capitolism newsletter (🔒), in which he explains why “centuries of U.S. cabotage laws”—which delegate the right to operate sea, air, or other transport services within a particular territory—have “not only caused high prices and a host of unintended (occasionally ridiculous) consequences, but also presided over (if not caused) the steady decline of American shipbuilding competitiveness and the embarrassing degradation of the merchant marine fleet.”

• On the website today, Andrew takes a long look at the unsolved mystery at the center of the coronavirus pandemic: Where and how did it start? He looks at efforts by the Chinese leadership to suppress information and the WHO’s China-friendly approach to investigating the sources of the global scourge. Dr. Peter Daszak, an American who was part of the WHO team that just released a report of its findings on the pandemic’s origins, tells Andrew: “There was no cover-up.” Daszak, who has experience in the lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, says: “Working with that lab in Wuhan for 15 years, talking to technicians, having our staff embedded in that lab, you learn a lot.”

Let Us Know

Did you watch any live coverage of the impeachment hearings yesterday? Did anything you saw change your mind about whether senators should vote to convict President Trump? Do you think it’ll change any minds among the senators?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Correction, February 11, 2021: While the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools reached an agreement to bring elementary and middle school students back to in-person learning over the next few weeks, the return date of high school students has not yet been determined.