The Jan. 6 committee needs to get louder. Much louder.

WASHINGTON » The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol will fail us if it quietly goes about its important work. It needs to be louder. Much louder.

Eleven months ago, a seditious mob used brownshirt-style violence to prevent Congress from certifying the results of a free and fair election. This rip in the fabric of our democracy was patched within hours, but it was not fully mended — and cannot be until there is a full accounting of how and why the attack happened.

The committee, led by Reps. Bennie G. Thompson, D-miss., and Liz Cheney, R-wyo., is doing the right things. But most of its work is out of sight — which, for most Americans, means out of mind. Many Republicans would like to pretend Jan. 6 was just “one day in January,” as former vice president Mike Pence (whose own life the rioters threatened) shamefully put it. Nothing to see here, folks.

But the insurrection was an unprecedented event in our life as a nation, and we must not allow it to be minimized. Members of Congress hid under seats in the House chamber and put on gas masks as angry mobs tried to smash their way inside. Police officers defending the Capitol were savagely beaten. Our democracy’s citadel was defiled by rioters whose intent was to keep defeated incumbent Donald Trump in power. When I saw this sort of thing happen in other countries, it was called an attempted coup d’etat.

The committee has subpoenaed the right witnesses: Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s onagain-off-again Rasputin; Jeffrey Clark, the Justice Department official willing to concoct “evidence” to back up Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud; Mark Meadows, the chief of staff who spent Jan. 6 at Trump’s side.

Those witnesses and others, however, have decided to stonewall, hoping to delay the panel’s investigation, even to run out the clock until the next Congress convenes in January 2023 — perhaps with a Republican majority that could disband the committee. Look at Bannon’s case: The House held him in contempt, and the Justice Department properly filed criminal charges. He was arrested — but his trial won’t take place until July.

There is nothing the committee can do to make the wheels of justice grind faster. But so what if the marquee miscreants are afraid to testify? The committee reportedly has already interviewed hundreds of witnesses and collected thousands of documents. Why doesn’t it present more of its findings, and grab some attention doing so?

For example, Meadows is now taking the zipped-lip route after some initial cooperation. But we learned this week that the committee has texts and emails showing he was involved in discussions to appoint “alternate” electors who would cast their electoral votes for Trump rather than Biden, despite the voting results. “I love it,” Meadows reportedly wrote of such a plan.

That’s pretty explosive stuff. So why did we learn it from a letter the committee chairman sent to Meadows’s lawyer? Why didn’t the committee find some way to trumpet this information in a public hearing, with television cameras rolling and somebody, anybody, in the witness chair? It could be an aide to Meadows. It could be Meadows’s driver.

There’s no need to be as brazen as Republicans were when they decided to drive down Hillary Clinton’s approval numbers by staging endless hearings on the tragic Benghazi incident. There wasn’t any actual wrongdoing in that case, except by the terrorists who killed our ambassador and three other Americans. But constant repetition kept Benghazi in the headlines and forced everyone involved to answer endless questions. On Jan. 6, by contrast, there was massive wrongdoing — wrongdoing that followed a script laid out in advance by people who should be held accountable. According to Thompson’s letter, Meadows’s text messages about the “alternate electors” scheme were exchanged with a member of Congress. Who?

The way to investigate a crime with an eye toward prosecution — and Jan. 6 was definitely a crime — is to gather information stealthily, step by step, making as little noise as possible until the time comes to pounce. That is what I hope and pray the Justice Department is doing right now. Not just the rioters, but also the planners should go to jail.

But the select committee has no power to prosecute. Its only job is to reveal — and to do so in a way that makes the nation pay attention.