[Charged with investigating the January 6th insurrection, the
committee made a devastating case against Trump, regardless of what
the attorney general elects to do. ]
[[link removed]]

THE COMMITTEE WRAPS IT UP  
[[link removed]]


 

Harold Meyerson
December 20, 2022
The American Prospect
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Charged with investigating the January 6th insurrection, the
committee made a devastating case against Trump, regardless of what
the attorney general elects to do. _

Chairman Bennie Thompson (D-MS), center, speaks as the House select
committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol
holds its final meeting, December 19, 2022, on Capitol Hill., Jim Lo
Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP

 

On Monday, the House committee investigating the January 6th
insurrection moved from the realm of facts—which they’d uncovered
and documented both thoroughly and dramatically—to those of law and
history. They cited four separate laws that they believed their
evidence showed that former President Trump had violated, the most
serious being the statute against inciting an insurrection and giving
aid and comfort to the insurrectionists. And they referred their
recommendations for prosecution to the Justice Department. As to
history: Well, they secured their entry into its annals by adding to
the very short list of congressional investigations that exposed a
fundamental wrong and persuasively sought to right it.

The committee’s most obvious antecedent is the Senate committee,
chaired by North Carolina’s Sam Ervin (who cloaked a wily legal mind
behind the facade of a good ol’ boy), that investigated Watergate
and turned up, among much else, the unanticipated revelation that
Richard Nixon had secretly recorded all of his meetings. By the time
those hearings had concluded, Nixon’s continuing tenure in office,
not to mention the legitimacy of his continuing presidency, hung by a
thread. Other such impactful hearings include Henry Waxman’s
takedown of tobacco company CEOs, and the Progressive Era’s Pujo
Committee hearings [[link removed]] into
the chicanery of America’s leading bankers.

The key to the January 6th Committee’s success was its focus on
Trump. They documented how he’d planned weeks before Election Day to
claim victory even if he lost; how he knew that he had in fact lost;
how he sought to get state election officials, his own Justice
Department, and poor Mike Pence to overturn that outcome; how he
summoned a mob to Washington and, knowing that members of that mob
were armed, sent them to the Capitol to disrupt, delay, and somehow
reverse the formal announcement of Joe Biden’s victory; and how he
refused during three hours of the ensuing mayhem to tell that mob to
stand down.

That wasn’t the only factor in the committee’s success. The
presentations by its members—most notably, Liz Cheney—were at no
point tendentious and, at least in Cheney’s case, both heartfelt and
eloquent. The committee’s decision to hire former network news
executive James Goldston, formerly of _Nightline_ and _Good Morning
America_, to help craft their broadcast hearings amply paid off in the
clarity and drama with which they presented their case.

I’m not a lawyer and can’t even begin to assess the legal
thresholds that today’s referrals will have to surmount to persuade
the Justice Department to indict Donald Trump. What I do know is that
Attorney General Merrick Garland’s headaches have just become
migraines. On CNN immediately following today’s hearings, former FBI
Director Andrew McCabe suggested that summoning an insurrection might
be a hard charge to prove. But in the court of public opinion (at
least, that portion of the public that doesn’t believe empiricism is
a satanic plot) and in the verdict of history, it’s not clear how
Trump’s 187-minute refusal to tell his goons to stand down doesn’t
constitute providing aid and comfort to insurrectionists.

The key to the January 6th Committee’s success was its focus on
Trump.

The headaches won’t afflict just the AG. How are Rupert Murdoch’s
minions going to respond to yesterday’s referrals, now that
they’ve literally relegated Trump to page 27 of the _New York Post_?
The highbrow stooges who write _Wall Street Journal_ editorials will
likely take a “let sleeping dogs lie” line: Trump is yesterday’s
man; let’s move on to something more important, like cutting Social
Security. But what of Fox News, where Trump has recently become He
Whose Name Shall Not Be Mentioned? Even as they bang the drums for Ron
DeSantis, Tucker & Co. know their viewers expect savage denunciations
of the January 6th Committee and at least _some_ defense of the God
That Failed. That’s not Garland’s conundrum, but it’s a
conundrum nonetheless.

If Justice does go ahead with a Trump prosecution, it’s also not
clear how that will affect the 2024 Republican primary electorate.
Polls now show that Trump has fallen well behind DeSantis as
Republicans’ preferred choice. But prosecuting Trump will likely
stir his remaining followers to swamp the polling places on primary
day, and if DeSantis is just one of several non-Trumps on the ballot,
that could perhaps give Trump a sufficient plurality to claim the
nomination. That, of course, would immeasurably help Joe Biden win a
second term, or if Biden doesn’t run, ease any Democratic
nominee’s glide path into the White House. In which case, indicting
Trump might actually be the smart move, politically, for the
migraine-mired Merrick.

At the break in the session of the Army-McCarthy hearings that
followed attorney Joseph Welch thundering at Joe McCarthy, “Have you
no decency, sir?” the great Murray Kempton noted that the crowd in
the room spontaneously applauded Welch, and that among those
applauding were a couple of newspaper photographers. Kempton added,
“I have never believed before that a press photographer cared
whether any subject lived or died.”

At the conclusion of yesterday’s final session, as the January 6th
Committee members rose to leave the room, the crowd applauded. I
wasn’t there to see what the photographers did, but I’m pretty
sure I know how future historians will respond.

===

* House Select Committee on January 6; Donald Trump; The Jan. 6
Insurrection;
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]