Mandel Ngan/Pool via AP
The House select committee investigating the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation, June 9, 2022, on Capitol Hill.
As overtures go, this one packed a wallop.
The leadoff hearing of the House committee investigating the January 6th insurrection was intended to demonstrate the threat that that day’s riot posed not just to Congress but to the legitimacy of the constitutional transfer of power, and that Donald Trump was certainly in a moral sense and probably in a legal sense behind it.
The case, whose historic context was laid out by Chairman Bennie Thompson and whose particulars were mapped out with pointed clarity by Vice Chair Liz Cheney, appears based on several facts—some already known, some quite new—that the committee leaders, using video clips from witnesses, deftly laid out. One of those facts is that people whose business it was to know clearly told Trump that he had lost the election—most prominently, his attorney general Bill Barr, in whose videoed testimony that was aired said he told Trump that his contentions of fraud and rigging were “bullshit.” It’s not clear, and may never be, whether Trump actually believed this, in which case he knew he’d lost the election that he was illegally and unconstitutionally seeking to overturn, or whether his industrial-strength narcissism kept him from acknowledging what the facts said and he still was OK with contravening the Constitution to keep his hold on power. What is clear is that either way, Trump is the last person any sentient being would want to occupy the White House.
Cheney also alluded to other instances of mind-boggling bad faith that will be detailed in the hearings to come, including that John Eastman, who came up with the bright idea that Vice President Pence could single-handedly declare the election null and void when he chaired the session tallying the electoral votes, had written a month previous that this Pence strategy was nonsense. Another preview of revelations of culpability came when Cheney mentioned that Republican Rep. Scott Perry, who’d brought Eastman into Trump’s coven, sought a post–January 6th pardon from Trump before Trump left office, and that he wasn’t the only congressional Republican who did so.
That’s not normal conduct for a member of Congress unless they think they may well have violated the law.
In other words, the committee appears ready to make the case that the conspirators to overturn the election, among whom Trump was both the germinal and seminal figure, likely knew that they were lying when they said Trump had won, and surely knew that keeping him in power through the bizarre and desperate means they’d chosen broke the law and violated the Constitution.
What makes Trump a formidable figure, of course, is that of all the slimeballs and nitwits involved in this conspiracy, he was probably the only one who didn’t in the slightest degree care that he might be breaking the law and contravening the Constitution. Stacked up against the shattering humiliation of acknowledging that he’d lost, such legal niceties were of no concern to him whatsoever.
Does that mean Trump knew he was inciting a violent insurrection when he told the Proud Boys to stand by, and when he tweeted an invitation (just hours, we learned last night, after meeting with the cracked cabal of Flynn, Powell, and Giuliani, with no staff present to tamp those lunatics down) to his fans to come to D.C. on the day the electoral votes were to be tallied, and that it would be “wild”? Whatever uncertainty still hangs over that question, which later hearings may dispel, the one thing we can be sure of is that he certainly didn’t care if his hold on power was obtained by violence. His conduct during the breach of the Capitol, we already knew, makes that perfectly clear, and the hearings will make that clearer still.
The committee appears ready to make the case that the conspirators to overturn the election likely knew that they were lying.
The power of the kind of hearing that convened last night isn’t simply evidentiary; it’s also emotional, and Officer Caroline Edwards’s testimony surely provided that. The Murdoch minions on Fox are working mightily to undercut the hearings—without, of course, actually airing them so that Fox devotees can judge for themselves—but no one who saw the videos of Edwards on the ground and heard the cry “officer down!” and who then heard Edwards testify about the toll the violence took on her and her colleagues with the just-the-facts statement “I was slipping in people’s blood” can dismiss the hearing’s power. Which is precisely why Fox isn’t airing the hearings.
The committee is presenting a more carefully scripted and laid out presentation than that presented in the Watergate hearings half a century ago, but those hearings began with many of their key revelations (most particularly, that Nixon had taped all his conversations) still unknown to the senators until they ran across them several months into the process. In the current hearings, the committee has had the better part of the year to screen footage and take testimony; they know their case cold and, clearly, are laying it out in the manner they’ve deemed most effective.
One similarity between the two hearings is that both of their chairmen had a whale of a Southern accent. The Watergate go-round was presided over by North Carolina Sen. Sam Ervin, a grandfatherly white-haired segregationist who continually declared he was “just a country lawyer,” a dead giveaway that he was a crafty old fox who knew just how to bring Richard Nixon down. Ervin spoke with an accent so impenetrable that when he once said the words “presidential aides,” The New York Times reported he’d said “presidential eggs.”
Bennie Thompson’s drawl is a good deal more modest and a good deal more intelligible than Ervin’s, but even as we delve into crimes that make Watergate look about as serious as jaywalking by comparison, it’s at least nice to know that we’ve moved from a chairman who filibustered every civil rights bill to a chairman who dutifully represents the Black farmers, public servants, and musical wizards of the Mississippi Delta. January 6th was worse than Watergate, but we have made some progress in the past 50 years.
