The January 6 Committee Hearings Make Pelosi’s Tactical Error Clear

T he January 6 committee focused its hearing this morning on “Stop the Steal,” President Trump’s scheme to retain his office by discrediting the election as having been stolen by fraud.

Unforeseen circumstances threw the hearing for a loop before it had even begun: The major witness the committee had lined up, Trump 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien — who was evidently expected to testify that in the immediate aftermath of the election, Trump was advised, by knowledgeable people and in no uncertain terms, that he had lost — had to cancel at the last minute, because his wife went into labor.

Though the proceedings were nevertheless edifying, they also managed to underscore what a blunder it was for House speaker Nancy Pelosi to deny Republicans the power to fill what were supposed to be five GOP seats on the committee.

Rather than countenancing a true investigation, Pelosi has turned the committee into a vehicle for the construction of a political narrative about Donald Trump’s misconduct and unfitness. Though the committee’s Democratic defenders would reply that there are two Republicans on the committee, those members — Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger — were selected by Speaker Pelosi solely because of their outspoken anti-Trump stance, and over Republican leadership’s objections. It is thus not correct to describe the committee as “bipartisan.”

Cheney and Kinzinger do not represent the House Republican perspective on the Capitol riot or Trump. While that mainstream GOP perspective is not monochromatically pro-Trump, it is more indulgent of Trump’s empty fraud claims, and more dismissive of how atrocious the riot was, than it should be.

When pressed on this point, Trump-friendly Republicans tend to deflect with complaints about how Democrats used the pandemic as a pretext for undermining election integrity. When pressed on the five-hour riot, they tend to deflect with complaints about Washington’s apathy regarding the months of more lethal rioting that followed George Floyd’s death in police custody. These are valid points in their own right, but they are not a defense of Trump or the Capitol riot. Trump was not crusading on behalf of election integrity; he was making specific, false claims that ballot boxes were stuffed and ballot-counting machines were manipulated to change Trump votes to Biden votes. And the Capitol riot may not have been clear enough in objective and severe enough in time, space, and lethality to be deemed an “insurrection,” but it was still a violent uprising in which people were killed, police were injured, and the vital American tradition of peaceful transition of power was betrayed.

What Trump did was impeachable. What the rioters did was criminal. Together, their actions constitute an abominable chapter in American history. It ought to be possible for Republicans to condemn the former president and the events that led to the January 6 uprising while continuing to demand voting safeguards and an even-handed law-enforcement response to all politically motivated violence.

The highlight of today’s hearing was more testimony drawn from the lengthy videotaped deposition of former Trump attorney general Bill Barr. Barr compellingly explained that there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and he swatted aside the Trump campaign’s individual fraud claims with hard facts.

It was important testimony. It was also obvious that, had Pelosi allowed House minority leader Kevin McCarthy to name the members of his choice to fill GOP committee seats, not one of them would have laid a glove on Barr. I doubt any of them would even have tried.

As I’ve observed above, the slippery pro-Trump position is not to confront, but to deflect. Barr’s solid account — based on facts and the law, and coming from a top Trump official who wanted the president to be reelected — would not have been impeached if Representatives Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, whom McCarthy tried to appoint, had been seated on the committee and permitted to cross-examine Barr. Consequently, the testimony would have been more powerful: The opportunity to challenge Barr’s account would have lent fact-finding integrity to the hearing, and the inability to shake his account would have enhanced our confidence that the hearing was getting to the truth.

That is how real investigations and hearings work: They are adversarial proceedings. Cases are not won by the lawyers and the point of view they represent; they’re won by witnesses and evidence, and by the ability of both to hold up in the crucible of cross-examination and close scrutiny.

Jordan and Banks are shrewd fellows. They wouldn’t have tried to take Barr on regarding January 6. They would instead have tried to shift the focus from Trump by asking the former AG about politically motivated violence committed by the radical Left that the Biden administration is ignoring or excusing. That might have put the Capitol riot in some useful context but wouldn’t have excused the riot or Trump’s role in fomenting it. It also would have respected due process, thus allowing us to come away believing we understood what had happened, why it was significant, and how to appraise it in the greater scheme of things.

Alas, Pelosi chose not to play ball with McCarthy, turning the committee into an exercise in partisan theater, instead.