Last detail for 1/6 Committee: Recommend charges
What figures to be the final public adventure of the Jan. 6 Committee is scheduled for 1 o’clock Wednesday, and granted, these hearings went on too long, looked a little too polished and were hamstrung from the start by an audience too polarized to be persuaded anyway.
And yet for all of that, no one who watched them can say in good faith they weren’t seriously illuminating.
Reducing mountains of evidence into digestible meals for a television audience is no small trick by itself, but let that not obscure the primary achievement of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the United States Capitol: It got the 2021 coup against America to tell on itself.
No one who sat through even one session of this eight-round seminar can walk away recalling a partisan rant. That was not the Radical Left Progressive Congressional AllStars who were aiming the klieg lights at the roots of an insurrection for most of the last four months. The most damning testimony — most all of the critical testimony — came from insiders. Inside the Trump campaign, inside the Trump legal team, inside the offices of Republican congressmen, inside the White House Chief of Staff’s office, inside sources still to be presented Wednesday and, not to be forgotten, inside the family.
Ivanka Trump, the former guy’s own daughter, in videotaped testimony presented June 9, said she accepted former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr’s conclusion that there was no evidence the 2020 election had been stolen, the very lie that begat the Jan. 6 attack. Ivanka’s former chief of staff said Ivanka heard the phone call on which the former president called Vice President Mike Pence “the pword,” for refusing to overturn the election, which would have been illegal.
Illegal. What a concept.
In the Trump family, illegal is for other people, common people. Republicans were more than content to let the family sustain that toxic delusion. Many were exuberant coup cheerleaders and willing coup accomplices. When the history of the hearings is definitively written, the lead quote will be Liz Cheney’s.
“Tonight, I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,” said the Wyoming Republican who’d already been verbally stoned from her leadership position, “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
Ms. Cheney and Illinois’s Adam Kinzinger are the only Republicans on the nine-member Jan. 6 Committee, but if that smacks of imbalance, it’s only because leading GOP brainiac Kevin McCarthy would not agree to the 50-50 membership split that would have provided both sides equal subpoena powers. The insurrection seemed to Mr. McCarthy not worth an investigation, so House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger on the committee and called it bipartisan. Brilliant, Kevin.
But look, as the hearings wore through the summer, no Democrat said that Rudy Giuliani, last of the red hot psycho litigants and Mr. Trump’s most influential lawyer, was “definitely intoxicated” on Election Night and advised the president to just go out and declare victory, which he did. It was Trump adviser Jason Miller who said that.
No Democrat told the committee that Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows tried to “establish the narrative” that Mr. Trump was still in charge despite the fact that Mr. Pence was the only one issuing orders during the insurrection. It was the nation’s highest military officer, Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said that. “Vice President Pence was very animated,” Mr. Milley told the committee in videotaped testimony. “He used very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders.” Mr. Milley said Mr. Meadows told him “we have to kill the narrative that Pence is making all the decisions.”
It wasn’t a Democrat that relayed to the committee Mr. Giuliani’s admission that there was no evidence for the stolen election twaddle. That was Rusty Bowers, Republican Speaker of the Arizona House, who said that in a phone call trying to get him to go along with Mr. Trump’s phony electors scheme, Rudy told him, “We have lots of theories, we just don’t have any evidence.” Mr. Bowers went on to proudly lay out for the Committee his Republican bonafides, going so far as to say he’d vote for Mr. Trump again.
(Less than six weeks later, Mr. Bowers had changed his mind, telling ABC’s “This Week” program “I’ll never vote for him, but I won’t have to, because I think America’s tired and there’s some absolutely forceful, qualified, morally defensible and upright people, and that’s what I want. That’s what I want in my party, and that’s what I want to see.”)
It wasn’t a Democrat who told the committee that Mr. Giuliani foretold of Jan. 6, that Mr. Meadows said “things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6,” that Mr. Trump told his operatives to “take the (bleeping) mags away,” meaning the magnetometers screening for weapons in the crowd he’d assembled Jan. 6, that Mr. Trump had thrown his lunch (ketchup please!) against the wall when Mr. Barr told the Associated Press there was no evidence of election fraud sufficient to overturn the election. All of that came from Mr. Meadows’ top aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, the Jan. Committee witness MVP.
So far anyway.
That could change Wednesday, when the committee might unearth a guy who dresses like a Batman villain, has a tattoo of Richard Nixon on his back, and would certainly be in jail already if Mr. Trump hadn’t pardoned him.
Roger Stone is always ready for his close up.
The committee’s work is almost done. It will absorb some long term criticism for being unable or unwilling to compel testimony from Mr. Pence and Mr. Trump, but the former is an inveterate weasel and the latter a pathological liar. What good would it do?
The criticism that will stick will be if the committee somehow declines to recommend criminal charges against the 45th president to the Justice Department. In that case, all of its excellent work will morph from unforgettable to unforgiveable.