[The final hearing of the January 6 committee showed that the
former president was far from alone in fomenting the insurrection.
Here are some of his confederates. ]
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TRUMP MAY BE THE FIGUREHEAD, BUT THE ROT OF JANUARY 6 PERMEATES THE
REPUBLICAN PARTY  
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Grace Segers and Daniel Strauss
December 19, 2022
The New Republic
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_ The final hearing of the January 6 committee showed that the former
president was far from alone in fomenting the insurrection. Here are
some of his confederates. _

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As the House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol
on January 6, 2021, held its final meeting on Monday—the last before
the incoming Republican House majority takes office and likely ends
any further congressional investigations into the worst attack on
Congress since the 1800s—the cable news–ready headline was the
committee’s decision
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refer several criminal complaints about former President Donald
Trump to the Justice Department. While the referrals are largely
symbolic, and the Justice Department is embarking on its own
investigations into the insurrection, Monday’s meeting and the
committee’s as-yet-unreleased report are intended to provide an
evidential grounding demonstrating Trump’s culpability as the prime
instigator for inciting the assault.

Buried deeper amid more than a year of exhaustive investigations,
outlined by the committee in more than 160 pages of introductory
material released on Monday, a picture emerges: Trump may have been
the linchpin of the events of January 6, but the plot to overturn the
democratic process was a group effort, featuring the head of the
Republican National Committee, several prominent members of Congress,
and a bevy of people influential in modern Republican politics. Trump
may be the key actor and figurehead of the movement, but the strain of
election denialism in the GOP goes much deeper than one man alone.

Ronna McDaniel

Trump’s efforts to disrupt the Electoral College with a slew of fake
electors brought in top Republican officials. According to the report,
in the early half of December, Trump held a teleconference with
Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel and lawyer John
Eastman in order to get them to help “prepare a series of false
Trump electoral slates of seven states Biden actually won.” McDaniel
agreed to help. But rank and file committee members weren’t totally
on board, the committee found. The report says that multiple
Republicans who were “persuaded to sign the fake certificates also
testified that they felt misled or betrayed, and would not have done
so had they known that the fake votes would be used on January 6th.”
McDaniel, apparently, wasn’t one of them. The committee highlighted
the false elector scheme that McDaniel took part in, stating based on
her testimony that “sufficient evidence exists for a criminal
referral of President Trump for illegally engaging in a conspiracy”
to violate the law.

Ironically, as she runs for another term as chair of the RNC, McDaniel
more recently wants some space from Trump. When she was asked if she
would seek Trump’s support as she runs for RNC chair, she refused
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answer.

Scott Perry

Scott Perry, a Republican representative from Pennsylvania, was
an early subject
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the committee’s
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Perry’s name comes up over 10 times in the final report. The
committee suggests that the Justice Department seek (through grand
jury subpoena “or otherwise”) communications between Perry, House
Republican caucus leader and likely future House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy, and others who are likely to be “materially relevant
communications with Donald Trump or others in the White House.”
Those lawmakers have refused to comply with subpoenas from the January
6 committee. In the weeks following the 2020 presidential election,
Perry put together
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set of unfounded allegations of voter fraud and sought to pass those
on to the acting attorney general. The committee’s report is a
pretty strong nudge to the Justice Department to further investigate
Perry.

Jim Jordan

Another key player identified by the committee is Representative Jim
Jordan, the incoming chair of the Judiciary Committee, a powerful
conservative ally of McCarthy and a pugilistic defender of Trump. The
committee highlighted a conference call convened by Jordan on January
2, 2021, in which he, the president, and other GOP members of Congress
strategized about ways they could delay the counting of electoral
votes. He spoke with Trump for 18 minutes later that day and had at
least two phone calls with the president on January 6. The committee
also found that Jordan spoke with White House staff about the prospect
of obtaining presidential pardons for members of Congress on January
7. Jordan, who was one of McCarthy’s initial picks to serve on the
select committee, also ignored a subpoena by the committee in June.
(McCarthy withdrew his Republican picks for the committee after
Speaker Nancy Pelosi threatened to pull Representatives Jordan and Jim
Banks.)

Andy Biggs

Representative Andy Biggs was another conservative Republican who
encouraged efforts to contest election results, the committee found.
Biggs and Arizona state Representative Mark Finchem attempted to
gather signatures appointing a false slate of electors to overturn
Biden’s victory in the state. (Finchem unsuccessfully ran
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Arizona secretary of state this year and has attempted to challenge
his own election results.) Biggs has also defied a subpoena from the
select committee.

Other GOP members of Congress

More than 100 House Republicans and several Senate Republicans voted
to overturn the election results after Congress reconvened on January
6 after the mob of insurrectionists had been cleared from the
building, but the select committee identified some GOP lawmakers as
encouraging Trump’s efforts even before then. The offices of
Representative Mike Kelly and Senator Ron Johnson were delivered fake
slates of electors for Wisconsin, and Kelly’s and Johnson’s
offices attempted to share those slates with former Vice President
Mike Pence, but his aide refused to accept them. Trump also called
Republican senators on January 6 during the riot, including Senator
Tommy Tuberville, whom he reached through Senator Mike Lee. (The
president’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, also attempted to contact
multiple senators on the evening of January 6.)

The committee has also been scathing in its criticism of McCarthy,
whom the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner described as
“scared” on January 6. McCarthy pushed back against Trump on
January 6 and the days thereafter, even suggesting privately that the
president could resign
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But in subsequent weeks, he repaired his relationship with Trump, and
he has since earned the former president’s endorsement
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be the next speaker of the House.

The final meeting of the committee, and its impending report, served
as a sort of passing of the baton from the committee to other entities
that could perhaps take concrete action—the Justice Department,
certainly, but also the House Ethics Committee and the Senate. As
Representative Jamie Raskin highlighted in Monday’s hearing, the
select committee had already presented some of its evidence to a
federal judge who had ruled in its favor in obtaining records from
Eastman. That judge also concluded
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Trump had participated in a “conspiracy to defraud” the United
States. (The committee also referred
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Giuliani, Jeffrey Clark, Kenneth Chesebro, and Mark Meadows to the
Justice Department for potential prosecution.)

The select committee also referred McCarthy, Jordan, Perry, and Biggs
to the Ethics Committee as part of its report, “only for failure to
comply with lawfully issued subpoenas,” according to introductory
material. (Biggs is currently challenging McCarthy for the speakership
from the right.) As the Ethics Committee is evenly divided between the
two parties, it’s impossible to imagine that the panel will take
action against the representatives who were part of the effort to
overturn the 2020 election.

When asked by _The New Republic_ whether he believed the Ethics
Committee would take action, Raskin replied, “I think that they will
undertake a serious discussion and dialogue about it. And they should
recall that what they do here will set a precedent going forward into
the future.”

While the Senate is remaining in Democratic control, the extent to
which it will continue to investigate the January 6 attack is still
unclear. “We haven’t made any decisions as to what we’re going
to be doing, but it’s part of a broad range of things that we’re
considering,” Senator Gary Peters, the chair of the Senate Homeland
Security Committee, told _The New Republic_ earlier this month when
asked if his committee would continue the work of the House Select
Committee.

In his opening statement on Monday, Committee Chair Bennie Thompson
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the importance of accountability in preventing another such attack
from occurring. “We have every confidence that the work of this
committee will help provide a roadmap to justice, and that the
agencies and institutions responsible for ensuring justice on the law
will use the information being provided to aid in their work,” he
said. Whether that “roadmap” is followed, however, now depends on
the choices of Justice Department officials and lawmakers in both
houses of Congress.

_Grace Segers
[[link removed]] @Grace_Segers
[[link removed]] is a staff writer at The New
Republic._

_Daniel Strauss
[[link removed]] @DanielStrauss4
[[link removed]] is a staff writer at The New
Republic._

Support independent political journalism. Donate to _The New
Republic _today.
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* Donald Trump
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* January 6 committee
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* Republican Party
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