Yesterday, Nicolle Wallace asked former Sen. Claire McCaskill to explain what would happen with the Jan. 6th committee.
"The prosecutor in me wants to lay this out like an opening statement," McCaskill said.
"We know Trump was watching TV. He watched TV all day long for four years. He watched all the channels. We can go through and we can put the images at a specific time. 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 Capitol.
"And frankly, he was watching a confrontation at the door of the house where someone was killed. This is what he was watching. And he liked it. He liked it. He thought this, what you are seeing right now, was terrific. Give me those facts. Give me those timelines, and give me a jury. 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 lay out. 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," she said.
Wallace said she never heard McCaskill put it so bluntly.
"I mean, what you described is more than a dereliction of duty, which is I think what Chairman Bennie Thompson describes. It's sadistic to watch people maiming other people and holding the singular power of making it stop because they were at your direction. He was the commander in chief of the mob that day, it would appear, not of the U.S. National Guards. What is the right sanction for that behavior?" she asked.
"Well, I think there's criminal liability here. I think he needs to be prosecuted and put behind bars for what he failed to do," the former prosecutor said.
"He alone -- that's why everyone was calling him. That's why Kevin McCarthy was calling him. That's why Lindsey Graham was trying to get ahold of him. What the 1/6 committee is going to do, They are going to show the public all of the people trying to get Donald Trump to do what any normal human being would do, stop the madness, stop the violence, stop the destruction. Instead, he had to tape over and over and over again a message because he was refusing to say what he needed to say, which was 'go home'.
"How many takes -- how many times did they tape him before he finally said go home? It was 187 minutes later, and somebody was dead? This is really simple stuff. It's not complicated. This is why it is so frustrating to watch DoJ not do something more aggressive. Now, as I say, I hope they are doing it and we just don't know about it. Because that's the right way to do it. If they come out with criminal charges against Donald Trump, I can't wait to come on your show to say I am sorry I was so critical of Merrick Garland," McCaskill concluded.
