‘We have to get it right,’ vows Jan. 6 probe chair
In Tuesday’s start, officers who faced rioters will speak
WASHINGTON — The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, Bennie Thompson, didn’t realize the severity of the Jan. 6 insurrection until his wife called him.
He was inside the Capitol, sitting in the upper gallery of the House, hoping to be able to tell his grandchildren that he was there when Congress certified Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
People are breaking into the building, London Thompson told him, and it was on television. “I’m watching people climbing over the wall right now,” she said.
“It doesn’t register,” the Mississippi Democrat recalled. “I said, ‘You can’t break in. There’s police and barricades and a lot of things out there.’ ”
But it was not long before the House chamber was under siege.
Police rushed Thompson and several dozen other members of Congress to another side of the gallery and told them to duck under their seats as supporters of then-president Donald Trump tried to break down the doors to the chamber below.
“It was a horrible day,” said Thompson, “still almost surreal that it even occurred.”
Like Thompson, many who serve and work in the Capitol are trying to make sense of the chaos that unfolded on Jan. 6. And he now has a guiding role in the process, appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-calif., as the chairman of a select committee that will investigate the attack. The panel will hold its first hearing Tuesday with police officers who battled the rioters.
As the longtime chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Thompson is accustomed to dealing with grave matters of national security. But his stewardship of the Jan. 6 panel will be a test unlike any other, as he tries to untangle the events of a violent insurrection that many House Republicans increasingly play down and deny.
“We have to get it right,” Thompson said. If the committee can find ways to prevent anything like it from happening again, “then I would have made what I think is the most valuable contribution to this great democracy.”
Thompson, 73, is a liberal fixture in Congress and longtime champion of civil rights, the only Democrat in the Mississippi delegation, hailing from a majority-black district in the state’s western half.
Several Democrats and Republicans said Thompson was the right choice to lead an investigation that is certain to be partisan and fraught.
“I’ve dealt with Bennie for 15 years, and we disagreed on a lot, but I don’t think there was ever a harsh word between us,” says former Republican Rep. Pete King of New York, who was the chairman and top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee for years opposite Thompson”
New York Rep. John Katko, who is now the top Republican on the Homeland Security Committee, gave a similar assessment.
Pelosi chose Thompson as chairman after he crafted legislation with Katko that would have created an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack. That bill won almost three dozen Republican votes in the House only to flame out in the Senate.
Far fewer House Republicans supported creating the House select committee, dismissing the effort as partisan. House Republican leader Kevin Mccarthy said the GOP won’t participate after Pelosi rejected two of his appointments, Republican Reps. Jim Banks of Indiana and Jim Jordan of Ohio.
Only two Republicans voted to create the panel — Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger. Pelosi first appointed Cheney to the committee and then added Kinzinger on Sunday after Mccarthy withdrew his picks.
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, another Democrat appointed to the select committee, says both parties have “partisan brawlers” — and Thompson is not one of them.
Still, Thompson has taken sharply partisan stances. He joined with about 30 Democrats in a 2005 vote to invalidate President George W. Bush’s victory — not unlike the dozens of Republicans who voted to invalidate Biden’s in January. The effort did not end in violence and John Kerry, the defeated Democratic presidential candidate, did not lead or join the effort to deny Bush his victory.
Last week, Thompson withdrew his participation in that lawsuit, saying he “wishes to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest between his role on the Select Committee and his role as a Plaintiff.”