 I'm not necessarily sure how confident I am that the January 6th Select Committee is going to bring about any justice and actually hold Donald Trump accountable for trying to subvert democracy in the United States in 2020. But what I do know is that some of the revelations have been pretty shocking. The lengths that Donald Trump was willing to go to to end democracy in the United States is absolutely starling. But a new revelation is very damaging to Donald Trump, at least from the standpoint of his reputation. Will this lead to consequences legally? Who knows? Nevertheless, this is really interesting. So Kyle Chaney and Nicholas Wu of Politico report the January 6th Select Committee says its evidence has shown that then President Donald Trump and his campaign tried to illegally obstruct Congress's counting of electoral votes and engaged in a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States. In a major release of its findings filed in federal court late Wednesday, the committee suggested that its evidence supported findings that Trump himself violated multiple laws by attempting to prevent Congress from certifying his defeat. Characterizing excerpts of nearly a dozen depositions from top aides to Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence, the committee described a president who had been informed repeatedly that he had lost the election and that his claims of fraud were unfounded only to reject them and continue to mislead the American public. He then pushed top advisors to continue strategizing ways to overturn the election results. The committee suggests Trump and some of his allies may have committed three distinct crimes, obstruction of an official proceeding. In this case, Congress's January 6th session to count electoral votes defrauding the United States by interfering in the election certification and spreading false information about the results and a violation of the District of Columbia's common fraud law. So we know that he tried to steal the election, but the question is did he break any laws? Did he actually commit a crime? And what the January 6th Select Committee is saying is, yes, we have evidence that he did indeed commit a crime. However, having evidence that he committed a crime doesn't necessarily mean that they can definitively prove this in the court of law. So that's really the question and the article kind of answers that question. Yeah, they can potentially prove this, but it's still a little bit tricky when it comes to the president of the United States. They go on to add to prove Trump committed felony obstruction. Investigators would have to show he corruptly intended to impede an official proceeding. And the committee says his work with Eastman to pressure Pence to take illegal acts could satisfy this requirement, particularly as Trump continued to spread claims of fraud that his own allies said were unfounded. Determining whether Trump violated criminal law on January 6th is a complex undertaking, though the panel's findings may drive up pressure on the Justice Department to reveal its own thinking on the matter. Prosecutors have charged hundreds of Trump supporters who breached the Capitol with seeking to obstruct Congress's efforts to count electoral votes, but applying that law to the former president presents a trickier calculus. The panel says the evidence supports an inference that Trump knew he had lost the election. Miller described a blunt conversation with Trump in which campaign aides told him he had lost, but the president nevertheless sought to use the vice president to manipulate the results in his favor. So that last paragraph doesn't give me much hope. So the panel says that the evidence infers that Trump knew, but explicitly did he state that he knew he didn't win and wanted to go ahead with trying to overturn the election anyway? I mean, what this is ultimately seemingly going to come down to is, was Trump dumb enough to actually believe his own lies or did he know that he lost but corruptly tried to overturn the election anyway? That's, I think, the ultimate legal question, the ultimate thing that will need to be proven here was their corrupt intent, apparently. I mean, I could be misinterpreting this because I'm no legal expert, but the way that I read this is I don't have much hope because it's Donald Trump. People in power, they get away with things like this and perhaps it'll be different this time, but it would be really important if Trump were held accountable legally because guess what, when you pose a threat to democracy directly like that, you shouldn't be allowed to run for office. So I hope that they can prove that he did corruptly try to obstruct the election process because he needs to be barred from ever running from public office again. Imagine if you were to run again and win. Does anyone actually believe that Trump would relinquish power? Who knows? I mean, we've seen time and again the way that authoritarian strongmen have undermined democracy, Erdogan and Turkey, Putin and Russia. So it's not absurd to think that Donald Trump, if he's able to obtain power again, would turn us into an illiberal regime, perhaps not full blown authoritarian, but certainly if he gets power, he knows he's not going to let that go this time. And that's really worrying. So they have to do everything in their power to make this case to prove that he corruptly did try to obstruct the election because if he's able to run again legally, then we all know that his victory couldn't mean the death of democracy in the United States. And some people might listen to that and say that I'm being hyperbolic. But how, how could you say that when we've seen everything that he's done? Zero evidence. There's zero evidence that the election was stolen. But yet he doesn't care. He tried to pressure Brad Raffensperger, the Secretary of State in Georgia, to find votes for him. So if he already did that, imagine what he would do if you got power again. I mean, he joked about running for multiple terms over the two that is constitutionally, that he's constitutionally limited to when he was in power. So I have no idea what he's going to do. But I do know that I don't want to find out. I don't want to see what happens if Trump gets power again. Who knows? Maybe he would win and then he'd step down after that last term that he's able to serve constitutionally speaking. But we've already seen how damaging he has been to democracy in the United States, the way that he single-handedly got millions of Americans to believe that democracy was stolen in the United States. I mean, I just think he's such a threat to democracy. You have to do everything in your power. Stop this to stop him. Because once you kill democracy, it's going to be very hard to get it back, right? To bring it back to life, I should say. So I don't know if anything is going to come out of this, right? But if we can't bar someone from running for public office ever again after doing what Trump did, then American institutions are just too weak to protect democracy long term. It's just only a matter of time until a different authoritarian, strong man comes along who's perhaps a little bit more savvy, a little bit more strategic than Donald Trump, less stupid than Donald Trump, who actually does kill democracy once and for all. So either way, we need to reform. We need to do everything in our power to protect democracy. And a really good start is stopping Donald Trump from ever running for public office again.