Here was an interesting exchange between Lawrence O'Donnell and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who is a former prosecutor.
"It seems Donald Trump was educating his crowds about who was on their side and who wasn't. Ted Cruz was out there, especially on the Senate campaign in Georgia, in front of those kinds of crowds, being very clearly on Donald Trump's side and trying to reverse these true votes," O'Donnell said.
"Did you have a feeling that there were some Republican members of the Senate, highly recognizable like Senator Cruz, possibly Senator Hawley, who are sitting there in the senate, never having felt threatened by this crowd at all, at any moment, because they knew that that crowd knew that they were on their side?"
"Well, what I think of with them is, we're still looking at what their role was in all of this," Sen. Whitehouse said.
"We made the referral to the ethics commission, ethics committee. The ethics committee will have its look. But when you look at the evidence today about the president's call to Senator Tuberville, asking him to delay the proceedings, to add objections, to spread it out, you could see that it's like a pinscher move. On one hand, you're getting your mob up to the Capitol, to do this damage and disrupt the counting of the electoral votes, but at the same time, you've got to open the window of time during which those electoral votes are counted in order to allow the mob to have its effect, to actually do the damage, to perhaps catch someone. But at a minimum to be able to disrupt.
"If this thing had gone smoothly and orderly, without objection, we might have been done by the time the mob had reached the Capitol. So there's a possibility of there having been some connivance between those who tried to create the delay and that being used to open a window long enough that the mob could fight its way in and disrupt the count.
"So, all of that remains to be seen, but it struck me that when the president called Senator Tuberville for that specific purpose, that could easily have been a similar call to another kind."
