Yesterday, the House Select Committee on the January 6th attack shared its conclusory findings. Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky, at Talking Points Memo, have a good distillation of the key takeaways. As has been widely reported, the criminal referrals the Committee made have no legal force. The Justice Department can act or not as it sees fit.
But as I said after the first night of hearings in June, I think this committee’s work has served both an historically and politically important purpose, a point I’ll return to below. And since a lot of you joined our little community after my last post about the hearings, in July, I thought I’d provide a brief catalogue of some of my previous writing on the proceedings.
Here’s part of my first entry, from opening night, June 9:
It’s common, of course, for us humans to say about something we already know or an event we’ve already lived through that, well, we already know. Therefore, we say, we don’t need to re-live it. But sometimes, actually, we do need to re-live it. It’s natural for us, over time, to discount that which we’ve already experienced, including what felt momentous at the time. It’s part of our adaptiveness, our ability to forget, to move on.
But that ability to forget is both a weakness and a strength. David Brooks wrote an op-ed in the New York Times this morning declaring that the hearings, before they’d even begun, were already a failure. That in essence, there was no point in rehashing what had happened. If Congress wanted to use its time productively, Brooks asserted, it should not engage in staging a pointless spectacle about the past. Instead, it should focus on how to prevent threats to democracy in the future.
I thought that view was wrong before the hearings began. But it took watching them to crystallize why. People need reminders of even disturbing events. Congressional proceedings about the future of democracy would be little more than an inert, bland, intellectual exercise, without some clear, fresh animating sense of fear and urgency about how close we are to the brink.
What the select committee presented, in its opening salvo tonight, was precisely that: a sense of immediacy, of threat, of urgency.
This, from day three of the hearings, a week later, which featured the compelling testimony of the retired conservative Judge, J. Michael Luttig:
“Today, almost two years after that fateful day in January 2021 … Donald Trump and his allies and supporters are a clear and present danger to American democracy. That’s not because of what happened on January 6th. It’s because to this very day the former president, his allies and supporters pledge that in the presidential election of 2024 if the former president or his anointed successor as the Republican Party presidential candidate were to lose that election that they would attempt to overturn that 2024 election in the same way they attempted to overturn the 2020 election but succeed in 2024 where they failed in 2020.”
Day four of the hearings, on June 22, focused on the scheme to replace the duly appointed slates of electors with fake slates that, the conspirators hoped and intended, Vice President Pence would accept as valid on the day of the counting
of the electoral votes, January 6.
I wrote, in part:
The hearings today again illustrate that a conspiracy can be both clownish and idiotic on the one hand, and deeply sinister on the other. (Arizona House Speaker Rusty) Bowers testified that during his numerous phone calls and encounters with Rudy Giuliani in the weeks after the November 2020 elections, Bowers and others repeatedly asked Giuliani and his lieutenant, Jenna Ellis, for concrete evidence to substantiate their wild accusations of a stolen election. Bowers said he asked Giuliani over and over again to provide the names of the supposedly thousands of illegal or dead voters Giuliani and Ellis claimed had voted in Arizona. Giuliani and Ellis repeatedly said they would. They didn’t, of course, since they don’t have the names, because their claims are fake. As the committee showed, through video clips played during the hearing, when Trump badgered [Georgia Secretary of State Brad] Raffensperger incessantly to accept his preposterous claims about fraud in Georgia, his accusations barely made sense. In one phone call, Trump told Raffensperger: “they found thousands and thousands of votes that were out of whack. All of them were against me.” And in another he insisted, “I won by hundreds of thousands of votes. Everyone knows it’s wrong.”
Between the two of them, Giuliani and Trump sound like a murderer’s row of morons when they try to convince people of a conspiracy that they themselves can provide zero evidence for. And yet, it’s all so sinister. For one thing, their wild lies have unleashed a torrent of life-altering venom at people like [the ruinously harassed Georgia election worker Shaye] Moss. And there is every reason to worry that what have been vile threats and harassment could escalate beyond even the violence of January 6 to something much worse in future elections. For another, once people have unchecked power, it’s irrelevant whether their lies are as transparently ridiculous as those of “The Big Steal.” The next time around, conscienceless leaders like Trump might have both the power to convince others to follow their orders and to accept their absurd lies *and* to punish remorselessly those who refuse to accept their version of reality. In other words, don’t let the fact that these guys are clowns whose scheme was ultimately unsuccessful this time around obscure the Orwellian nature and potential of all this.
After the committee hearing of July 21, I wrote about the extraordinary conduct of the man who may well be the next Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who angrily pleaded with Trump to stop the storming of the Capitol on the fateful day, only to fall back in line within a matter of weeks:
At his most desperate hour, McCarthy begged Trump to call off the dogs. Trump essentially told McCarthy to go fuck himself. In the following days, in private meetings with other Republicans, McCarthy condemned Trump for his role in inciting the attack and said it couldn’t be “swept under the rug,” that Trump must be held accountable. But since then, McCarthy remembered that his primary political responsibility, which he’d briefly forgotten, was to shill for Donald Trump. McCarthy resumed that work in earnest in May of 2021, when he tried to gum up the work of the then-forming January 6 committee. When the House was in the process of impaneling members to investigate the January 6 attack, Speaker Pelosi offered McCarthy the opportunity to nominate people for the committee. McCarthy gave her five names. Pelosi rejected two, Jim Banks and Jim Jordan, “obvious Trump saboteurs,” as Greg Sargent put it. But McCarthy could have kept the other three. Instead, he yanked all of his picks, hoping the resulting committee would be deemed hopelessly partisan and therefore ineffectual, as he himself has subsequently acknowledged.
McCarthy had also insisted that the committee focus on antifa, in addition to the events of January 6. Think about that. On the day of the insurrection, McCarthy calls Trump and tells him he has to get the rioters to stop. Trump initially responds by saying it’s antifa. McCarthy knows that’s garbage (so does, Trump, of course. He told the rioters “we love you” an hour later, when he finally did tweet that they should go home). But within four months, McCarthy wanted to downplay the seriousness of a President plotting a coup by investigating an obscure group with no political power, the very group that Trump had so brazenly thrown in McCarthy’s face when McCarthy and everyone else in Congress was under siege. As Vanity Fair’s Bess Levin has put it, “while all of this would be pretty mortifying for McCarthy if Republicans had any capacity for shame, the unfortunate thing is that they don’t.”
Since the hearings wrapped up in September, events have overtaken the committee’s work, to some extent. Attorney General Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate multiple possible crimes committed by Trump, including his role in the January 6 attacks. The midterm elections saw a sweeping repudiation of election deniers generally and most of Trump’s highest profile endorsees specifically. Trump appears to be in a much weaker position politically than he was when the hearings began. But the fundamental elements of Trumpism that helped engender the capitol attack, the nihilistic reality denial and appetite for violence-fueled stoking of chaos remain pervasive on the American right. Indeed, the new House majority will likely spend the bulk of its energy in the next two years further perpetuating those core features of Trumpism, even if Trump himself fails to attain the 2024 nomination.
But to repeat, none of that should obscure the important work the committee did. It has created a detailed and compelling historical record of an attempted coup that the former president and his henchpeople did everything in their power to bring to fruition. It communicated forcefully and clearly the stakes of letting the attempted coup fade from memory. What its measurable impact on public opinion is would be impossible to say with any precision. But insofar as the midterm elections plausibly turned, in part, on the apparent aversion of independent voters to the election-denying wing of the GOP, perhaps the hearings and the very substantial coverage they received successfully conveyed the stakes to some portion of voters. And while Trumpist nihilism remains at the core of today’s GOP, the larger electorate appears to be increasingly wary of such politics.
We remain in a precarious state. But if the committee contributed, even in a small way, to inching us back from the precipice of a much uglier political reality, we owe them a debt of gratitude.
On January 6, Trump did nothing to stop the riots – I imagine he was very angry. Three days earlier he had offered all the reinforcements that would be necessary to stop the riot. One might almost imagine that his enemies wanted the riot to take place... The capital police were hung out to dry. We now know that the election was stolen. The FBI and so many in the IC were finally able to stop Trump. They had promised they would and finally they did. The January 6 committee is an embarrassing one sided show trial.