What the January 6 Committee got right and got wrong

Making the case that Trump should not return to the White House was the committee’s primary goal.

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This effort from the committee was apparently successful. The hearings likely contributed to voters’ rejection of candidates who embraced Trump’s Big Lie in the 2022 midterms. And the panel may well also have succeeded in hurting Trump’s chances of returning to the White House in 2025.

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But the panel’s mandate was bigger than Trump. The committee’s official charge was to “investigate and report upon the facts, circumstances, and causes relating to” the January 6 attack.

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As various outlets have reported, Cheney believed that focusing on law enforcement mistakes would distract from Trump’s responsibility for the attack. Her view became the panel’s, and the report relegated to an appendix findings from a team of investigators that examined law enforcement failures. At Cheney’s urging, the committee’s report also excluded or limited findings from teams that looked into militia groups and extremism and financing for the attack.

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The January 6 committee’s final report has 845 pages and not a word against Mike Pence. The committee lauds the former VP and other top Trump administration figures for refusing to go along with Donald Trump’s attempted self-coup. But it does not address those same officials’ decision to remain silent about Trump’s lies for weeks after the election—a silence that helped the Stop the Steal movement grow from disorganized online conspiracy theories to a violent force that sacked the Capitol.

The committee is also gentle with the Capitol Police and other federal agencies involved in security, excusing their faulty preparation for January 6. [...] "Whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day.”

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Law enforcement agencies may not have known precisely what Trump would say that day, but he had been repeating the same lies for weeks. And far-right groups were planning to march toward the Capitol even before Trump’s speech. Everyone knew they were coming.

These omissions represent decisions by the committee to pull their punches against individuals and entities whose conduct they wanted to contrast with Trump’s. The committee did that to maintain focus on Trump’s ultimate responsibility for his efforts to overturn a democratic election and for the violence and chaos that resulted. That may have made committee’s work more effective politically. But it sacrificed a more comprehensive, unsparing assessment of the causes of January 6. [...] To produce what the New York Times called “a clean, uninterrupted narrative,” the committee left out the full, messy truth.

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Much of what Congress does is appropriately political theater. It’s politics for public consumption. The House and Senate have seats for spectators. Congressional oversight hearings occur in large part to communicate information to the public.

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The January 6 committee provided the best political theater in recent memory.

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They hired a veteran TV executive and a supporting team to produce their televised hearings. Those hearings consistently drew more than 10 million viewers, NFL-level numbers unheard of for lawmakers. Committee staff literally scripted the hearings, making members read off teleprompters, thus limiting the somniferous speechifying that saps energy from most congressional events. The panel used video to tell the story. And they hammered one point above all. “The central cause of January 6th was one man, former President Donald Trump, whom many others followed,” the report says—accurately—in its executive summary. “None of the events of January 6th would have happened without him.”

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The report’s appendix does state that police and federal agencies failed to act on evidence of violent plans by Trump backers.

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But there, and elsewhere, the committee foregoes a more searching analysis by suggesting that everyone “lacked the imagination to suppose that a President would incite an attack on his own Government.” That same claim is featured as one of the committee’s key findings.

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That claim is belied by [Trump's] tweets in preceding days. On January 5, Trump tweeted that Pence had the power to reject electors and also remarked on the large crowd converging on DC in a clear effort to pressure the vice president and Congress. [...] Organizers of the Ellipse rally had made fully public their plans to march to Congress after the address. Trump’s encouragement surely made things worse, but law enforcement had every reason to expect an angry crowd was headed to Congress that day.

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It is possible to compliment Pence’s refusal to carry out a coup on the House floor while also questioning his conduct leading up to the insurrection. The committee, however, did not do so.

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Even in his much-celebrated statement shortly before the riot, in which he refused to unilaterally overturn the results, Pence falsely suggested that the election had been compromised by “irregularities” and a “disregard for state election statutes,” and he said he welcomed the objections that Republican lawmakers like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley planned to raise during the certification process.

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While Pence eventually declined to speak to the panel, and even attacked it as partisan, many of his top aides cooperated extensively.

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The report offers particularly sympathetic treatment to former Attorney General Bill Barr. [...] Barr appeared to respond to Trump’s pressure by ordering the DOJ to investigate claims of fraud in the 2020 election, “even in the absence of evidence,” as the report notes. [...] Critics charged that Barr had bent to Trump’s will, using DOJ resources to probe baseless claims that Barr himself later described as “idiotic” and “bullshit.” The department’s top prosecutor for election crimes, Richard Pilger, stepped down in response to Barr’s order. But the report, relying heavily on Barr’s own account, does not fault Barr’s order. It largely accepts his version of events.

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[T]he report does not delve into why Barr waited until nearly a month after Election Day to counter Trump’s lies.

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The committee does not address the extent to which the weeks-long delay by most Republicans, who apparently feared angering Trump, lent plausibility to the defeated president’s false claims and emboldened the movement that ultimately attacked the Capitol.

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Republican complicity, before and after Election Day, required unstinting examination, too. So did the inadequate preparations of the Capitol Police and others. The committee punted on those tasks, to better focus on Trump. That left them short of the whole truth. It’s good that Mike Pence and others declined to join the ultimate coup attempt. But that is a low bar for leaders of American government. The January 6 committee should have asked more of them. And Americans should expect more of the committee.

  Mother Jones

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.