The real reason the January 6th Committee is going after Republican National Committee’s fundraising records
For quite awhile now I’ve felt that most observers were failing to see just how deeply and broadly the January 6th Committee has been following the January 6th money trail. This became apparent to me when it leaked out several weeks ago that the committee is considering making a criminal referral against Donald Trump for having fraudulently raised campaign funds by pushing the lie that he won the 2020 election – which is a felony if he knew it was a lie.
Today the January 6th Committee received voluntary testimony from Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel. Immediately thereafter, the committee subpoenaed RNC fundraising records from a third party vendor, and announced that it was doing so with the specific intention of gauging the “impact of false, inflammatory messages in the weeks before January 6th, the flow of funds, & whether contributions were actually directed to the purpose indicated.”
So why is this a big deal? For one thing, it sure makes you wonder how Ronna McDaniel’s testimony went today. We’ve been wondering why she’s spent the past several days kissing Donald Trump’s backside in cartoonishly over the top fashion. Perhaps it was to distract from the fact that she gave cooperative testimony to the committee. We’ll get that answer from the committee soon enough; if her testimony was uncooperative, it’ll surely subpoena her with the threat of contempt charges.
Whatever went down during McDaniel’s testimony today, it prompted the committee to subpoena everything. The RNC is already taking legal action to try to stop this. But the committee wouldn’t take this action unless it felt it already had enough evidence in hand to win the inevitable legal battle. The committee will win this battle; it’s a matter of when – and then all bets are off.
This is going to play out on two levels. First, the January 6th Committee is surely going to be able to expose that some really shady money flowed in and out of the RNC leading up to the Capitol attack, and prove once and for all that the Republican Party is financially in bed with America’s villains and enemies. Second, the committee can make a criminal referral against every Republican politician who sought campaign donations by pushing what they knew were lies about the 2020 election results.
This is what the battle is about. This is what the January 6th Committee has been steadily building toward all this time. We’re not only talking about taking down Donald Trump, but about blowing the lid off the criminal enterprise known as the Republican Party. And we’d still love to know what Ronna McDaniel wittingly or unwittingly gave the committee today that prompted it to conclude it could successfully win a legal battle to obtain the Republican National Committee’s fundraising records.
