You’ve heard it before. What is taking the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol so long to complete its investigation? I wonder about this and worry that Republicans might “run out the clock” before the Committee completes its work.
For those who want the truth about what happened on January 6 and who was responsible, there is good news this week. The committee will start public hearings on June 9. That first hearing will trigger a series of hearings that will dive into what Trump knew about the insurrection—and whether he was its mastermind.
We already know that after inciting rally attendees outside the White House on the morning of January 6, Trump retired to the White House private dining room despite stating, “I’ll be with you.” For the next several hours, Trump watched the rioters throw flag poles at police, smash doors and windows, and legislators flee for their lives. He watched as the vote count to certify the election of Joe Biden was disrupted. When asked to call the rioters off, he declined for several hours.
While watching the events on multiple TVs, Trump was also on the phone. He had several calls with House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, and others. What did they tell the President? What did he ask them to do?
Did Trump and others engage in a seditious conspiracy which is a felony? Many believe the answer is yes. To convict an individual of seditious conspiracy, the government must “prove that the defendant in fact conspired to use force.” That is a heavy lift: “Simply advocating for the use of force is not the same thing [as just advocating the use of force] and in most cases is protected as free speech under the First Amendment.”
The January 6 committee (and the Department of Justice) already know Trump and his allies advocated the use of force. The investigation seeks to establish that the President’s actions went beyond talk. Who recruited the rioters and paid the expenses that made their deadly trip to Washington possible?
One reason the January 6 committee has taken so long to complete its investigation is that the Trump team has not only declined to cooperate with the investigation but appears to have attempted to hide evidence. Why was Trump using “burner phones” for his calls to Capitol Hill?
If Trump, Donald Trump, Jr., Chief-of-Staff Mark Meadows, and many others were complicit in planning the attempted coup, how likely is it that they attempted to hide their involvement?
Fortunately for America, the committee did not abandon its efforts to conduct a comprehensive, thorough investigation after it met with uncooperative and, it appears, lying witnesses. After 10 months of work, it is ready to start publicly sharing its findings.
Here is what we are likely to learn this summer:
Trump approved the effort to disrupt the certification of the 2020 vote. It was one of several strategies, including dozens of unsuccessful lawsuits, intended to overturn election results. Disrupting the vote certification was a desperate, obviously illegal, action.
Several prominent Congressional Republicans knew the riot would take place and approved it. Remember Missouri Senator Josh Hawley fist-pumping rioters as they streamed towards the Capitol to smash windows and try to hang Mike Pence? The complicit legislators might include McCarthy, Jordan, Cruz, and Hawley, as well as a full clown-car carrying Lauren Boebert, Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, and several other members of the Freedom Caucus.
Trump’s team was directly involved in raising funds to support the organization and training of members of groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that were recruited to come to Washington. Fundraising helped pay their expenses while in Washington. The investigation will uncover not only who wrote checks, but also who requested them to write checks and what contact they had with Trump, Trump family members, and White House staff.
White House staff and others associated with Trump developed the strategy of how to retain the presidency and transmitted it to the insurrectionists. This means that White House officials wrote the January 6 “battle plan” and Trump approved it.
A minute-by-minute account of what Trump did on January 6. The expected detailed description of a president watching TV in the hopes that the attack would be successful will further damage Trump’s already plummeting popularity. The disgusting disclosures of a president enjoying the events of January 6 might finally end his leadership of the Republican party.
If the January 6 committee hearings are as powerful as some predict, the dynamics of the 2022 mid-term elections and, more importantly, the 2024 presidential election, could change. Recall that after Nixon’s overwhelming win in the 1972 election, Democrats won in a landslide in the 1974 mid-term elections and regained the presidency in 1976.
The January 6 hearings may prompt Americans who are still confused about the attack on the Capitol to realize it was a violent attack on democracy conceived of and executed under the leadership of the former President.
Stay tuned. It will be a bad summer for Republicans. But a good one for our Constitutional democracy.
J.E. Dean is a retired attorney and public affairs consultant writing on politics, government, nature, and other subjects.
Bill Anderson says
The January 6 committee is a congressional committee of democrats making some sort of effort to paint then-President Trump in a bad light for unknown reasons inasmuch as he had lost his re-election bid. If the committee was serious and truly believed that Mr. Trump was responsible for promoting such a matter, I have to wonder why the democrats who hated Trump from the day he announced his Presidential candidacy, and who now control the House of Representatives, the Senate and the Presidency – not to mention the FBI, CIA and the Dept. of Justice have failed to put the investigation into the hands of those entities where an investigation and charges to be resolved in a court of competent jurisdiction would be available? Goofy democrat politicians.