Jan. 6 panel hopes report can sway public
WASHINGTON — The House Jan. 6 committee has tried to recruit high-profile journalists to write its report about the attack on the Capitol, hoping to build a narrative thriller that compels audiences and is a departure from government reports of yore.
Committee members and staffers are seeking to compile dramatic videos, texts and emails in a digital format that is easy to understand — and easy to share on social media. And they want to put together blockbuster televised hearings that the public actually tunes into, according to people with knowledge of the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Their challenge: Making the public care deeply about an event that happened more than a year ago, and that many Americans feel they already understand.
They’ll attempt to do so this spring through public hearings, along with a potential interim report and a final report that will be published ahead of the November midterms. They hope their recommendations to prevent another insurrection will be adopted, but also that their work will repel voters from Republicans who they say helped propel the attack.
Democrats are widely expected to have a tough time in the upcoming midterm elections.
Committee staffers have interviewed writers to assist with quickly turning around hundreds of thousands of pages of depositions, records and other evidence into an accessible narrative, according to people familiar with the conversations.
“We do not want a bureaucrat to write this report but rather a historian or a journalist — or someone who writes and can tell a story in a compelling way so that people can actually understand what happened,” said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., a member of the committee.
Focus on responsibility
Two people with knowledge of the report say the committee wants it to include gripping testimony and quotes, along with starring roles for key players in the events leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.
Rep. Peter Aguilar, D-Calif., who has been steeping himself in reports issued by congressional investigations throughout history, told the Washington Post in an interview that the committee is committed to ensuring that the report isn’t written in “Congressional Research Service” style.
“Representing people of color and young people, I’m acutely aware of how they will process this work,” Aguilar added.
The committee has discussed the potential for criminal referrals should it produce enough evidence to support those findings.
“The role Congress has asked the Jan. 6 committee to play is one that’s much more focused on the moral responsibility, the corruption of power, and abuse of regular order that the Trump administration engaged in during those final weeks leading up to the insurrection,” said Garrett Graff, a journalist and historian who has authored books on Sept. 11 and Watergate.
“The Justice Department might decide that Trump is not criminally liable for his actions but that the committee is able to provide at least a high standard of proof that Trump was morally liable — and as a political question that latter standard is, in some ways, more important to the future of the country than the criminal ones,” Graff added.
The 9/11 Commission Report, formally named the “Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States,” became one of the best-selling government reports in American history, lauded for it’s narrative power and accessible writing. The report successfully pulled together thousands of interviews, 570 cubic feet of records, countless findings and extensive recommendations into a final piece of writing that read like a novel.
The committee has already met with individuals involved with the 9/11 commission.
Jamie Gorelick, a member of the 9/11 commission, said she met with the committee at the outset of the investigation and provided three central recommendations. Gorelick advised investigators and lawmakers to write the report in an accessible way; not to rush into hearings without sufficient findings; and to “build the case from the bottom up.”
Committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., “was most interested in that: how do we make the report tell a story? How do you take the different pieces of the story that are produced by a very large group of people and make it sing? And I think that’s very much what they would like to do,” said Gorelick of her discussion with the committee.
Gorelick added that the 9/11 commission’s work benefited from the commitment from victims’ family members, and said the committee would be wise to highlight the stories of law enforcement officials and those impacted by the insurrection to “bring home the consequence” of the day.
Unlike the Jan. 6 committee, however, the public broadly supported and approved of the work of the commission.
While two Republicans are serving on the Jan. 6 committee — Reps. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill. — House Republicans and conservative media have sought to assail the committee and Cheney and Kinzinger’s party credentials.
Campaign to discredit
The GOP’s campaign to discredit the committee’s work has found some success: a Washington PostUniversity of Maryland poll conducted earlier this year found that 54 percent of Americans characterize the protesters who entered the Capitol as “mostly violent,” and 36 percent of Republicans says the protesters were mostly peaceful.
“There’s one-third of the nation that will read it, onethird that might read it, and one-third that won’t even believe it,” said a committee lawmaker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly. The lawmaker added that even some of their Democratic constituents have lost interest in the committee’s work because of more pressing issues, like inflation and the coronavirus pandemic.
As it currently stands, the committee’s timeline has been pushed back as it races to wrap up depositions and interviews. Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., recently told reporters that public hearings are expected to commence in May.
“It’s a moving target,” said Thompson. “We have some timetables but when we get 10,000 pages of information that we need to go through, the timetable moves.”