WATCH Former Senator Offers Roadmap To Indicting Trump

@sarahburris
Senator Claire McCaskill

Senator Claire McCaskill

As more information becomes available about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, questions are surfacing beyond President Donald Trump's role, including what he was doing for hours while even his political allies were begging him to intervene.

Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace on Monday, former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who is also a former state prosecutor, explained what she would encourage Attorney General Merrick Garland to do in terms of persuading members of a grand jury to indict Trump criminally. She encouraged prosecutors to walk jurors through what it looked like in those moments when Trump was watching television coverage of the riots.

According to those who were there in the White House on Jan. 6, Trump was glued to the TV, excited over what his supporters were doing for him. What McCaskill explained is that the text messages, emails, phone calls and desperate requests for help he and his staff were getting are all evidence of Trump's malicious intent.

"We can go through and we can put the images at a specific time," she explained. "And we can then fill in the text messages, the phone calls that were flooding the White House saying, get him to call them off. Now, what was he watching on TV at those moments? He was watching windows being broken. He was watching police officers being stabbed with flag poles. He was watching people hang from the balcony in the Senate. He was watching people carry around government property proudly like trophies in the capital. And, frankly, he was watching a confrontation at the door of the House where someone was killed."

According to the accounts of those present, Trump loved it.

"Give me those facts. Give me those timelines, and give me a jury," McCaskill said. "I'm just telling you, any responsible leader would want to end the violence, not provoke it. That's what he did that day, and that's what this committee is going to layout. And that's where Merrick Garland is either going to rise to the occasion or go down in infamy as one of the worst attorney generals in this country's history."

Watch the entire interview below:

Reprinted with permission from Alternet

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