The Return of the January 6 Committee Show

A s it is with all made-for-television soap operas, you can take a week off as I just did and pick up The January 6 Committee Show right where you left off. I had a column Monday on the committee’s gamesmanship — in general, and specifically in connection with the testimony of former Trump White House counsel Pat Cipollone, given behind closed committee doors last Friday.

The committee is scheduled to reconvene in public on Tuesday afternoon. Yesterday, it announced that its planned prime-time spectacle on Thursday, to bookend last month’s Opening Night, was being postponed, at least until next week. Today’s session will focus on militia groups, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, some of whose members instigated the Capitol riot and have been charged with seditious conspiracy — the most serious offense leveled at anyone in connection with the uprising.

The panel maintains that it can show ties between these groups and advisers of former President Trump — such as Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, and Michael Flynn — who were complicit in promoting Trump’s “stop the steal” scheme to reverse the results of the 2020 election. As further discussed below, keep in mind that the committee does not allow its extravagant claims to be tested by cross-examination. Moreover, the Justice Department, which does criminal investigations for a living and began its probe months before the committee came into existence, has not alleged that Trump and his circle were involved in any criminal conspiracy — even though vague ties between some militia figures and some Trump associates have long been reported.

As we have noted for weeks, the committee is exposing some intriguing new details about what went on in connection with the Capitol riot, but it has not changed the basic outline of the story. How could it? In real time, the country watched the riot and Trump’s recklessly provocative speech immediately before it, rehashing false election-fraud claims that we’d seen rejected by court after court, including the Supreme Court, in the preceding two months.

No one ignored the riot. Trump was impeached by the House a few days later. Then, after he had already been out of office for a month, the Senate suspended all business to try him. He was acquitted, mostly because of the Constitution’s onerous two-thirds’ majority requirement for conviction and disqualification from future office, and partly because of the incompetent House impeachment investigation, led by Congressman Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) — in fact, the committee is trying to do now the investigation that the House should have done then. Naturally, Raskin was tapped to serve on the committee by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.). He will lead the presentation at Tuesday’s session, fresh from his beatification by the New York Times as the scourge of right-wing white-supremacy — but don’t you worry, the January 6 committee is not political at all, perish the thought!

Despite the acquittal at the impeachment trial, the Senate still voted heavily to convict Trump, 57–43. Most of the acquittal votes, furthermore, rested on a dubious constitutional claim that a non-incumbent was not subject to impeachment and removal. If the only question to be answered was whether Trump was unfit for office, the vote would have been closer to unanimous.

So it is not that the country failed to grasp the gravity of the Capitol riot, as committee members maintain. The American people saw the riot for the disgrace that it was at the time. It is not that the vast majority of the country fails to comprehend that Trump should never be president again — the point that the committee is beating us over the head with. The American people are generally indifferent to the committee, the media’s hype notwithstanding, because they realize that Trump has not been in power or able to influence events for a year and a half.

Our here-and-now is to grapple with the train wreck that is the Biden presidency — its mounting inflation, punitive energy policies, border insecurity, Afghanistan humiliation, national-security incoherence, and woke militancy. The public realizes that the patently political, monochromatically anti-Trump committee has chosen to broadcast its tightly scripted performances at this peculiar time solely because Democrats are desperate to shift the spotlight away from the incumbent president. They hope that reviving the specter of Trump will somehow mitigate the thrashing they are headed for in November. Indeed, the Times was positively unseemly in trumpeting the imperatives of electoral politics that drive the committee’s summer sessions: “Jan. 6 Hearings Give Democrats a Chance to Recast Midterm Message.”

While surprisingly candid about the partisan aims of this exercise, the Gray Lady’s description of the committee’s sessions as “hearings” is a joke. The panel is presenting a political narrative rather than conducting an investigation. There is no cross-examination of witnesses and no perspective permitted other than that of the committee’s nine members — seven Democrats and two Republicans, all hand-picked by Pelosi, all of whom would like to see Donald Trump prosecuted, and whose unanimous singular purpose is to draw attention, yet again, to his unfitness for office.

In light of this inquisitorial, political approach (the antithesis of how adversarial hearings are customarily conducted in the United States), it comes as no surprise that the committee deems negative information about Trump too good to check or try to corroborate. It thus publicly hypes hearsay accounts, such as former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s claim to have heard that Trump got into a physical altercation with Secret Service agents when they refused to drive him to the Capitol, without first corroborating those accounts by asking the agents who were allegedly involved if such an altercation happened. (There is public reporting that they deny Hutchinson’s version of events, but it is unknown whether they have been asked to testify under oath to that effect, or whether they’d actually be willing to do so.) And, as my Monday column related, while the committee publicly claims that Cipollone corroborated Hutchinson’s testimony, or at least did not contradict it, that appears to be largely because the committee went out of its way not to ask Cipollone questions about topics on which it knew that Cipollone was likely to contradict Hutchinson.

We can’t say for sure what happened. The committee does not release witness testimony. Its televised proceedings, for which it retained a former network executive as a consultant, are narrative performances. Video-recorded witness testimony is mined for nuggets that ostensibly bolster whatever point the committee wants to make, and these are spliced into the scripted public presentations. We have no idea whether the snippets we get are complete and accurate versions of the witness’s testimony on whatever point it is portrayed as supporting. Nor do we know whether that testimony, even if complete and accurate, has been contradicted by other evidence — including testimony from better-informed sources.

Obviously, our understanding of what is going on behind the scenes must come from mainstream-media outlets — i.e., the outlets that have good sources in a Democrat-dominated panel. These sources are strongly supportive of the committee’s anti-Trump predisposition, and thus inclined to soft-pedal the committee’s flaws. (Not to belabor yesterday’s column, but the Times’ explanation of “corroboration” was dizzying, mainly because the paper uncritically reported the committee’s contradictory claims that Cipollone both did and did not corroborate Hutchinson.)

As the committee reconvenes today, urging that Trump and his “stop the steal” confederates are criminally culpable for the riot, keep in mind what you won’t hear. The Department of Justice has been conducting a scorched-earth investigation of the Capitol riot for 18 months. Though it has charged over 800 people, it has never alleged that Trump and his advisers committed crimes. (Two Trump advisers, Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, have been charged with criminal contempt for ignoring committee subpoenas, not for actions connected to the riot.)

Not just that. Prosecutors have aggressively fought against defense efforts to shift blame to Trump — to claim that they attacked the Capitol at the direction of the president of the United States. As I’ve pointed out before, the Justice Department and the committee have antithetical theories of the riot. For the latter, Trump is the catalyst of the violence. For prosecutors, he is tangential — a mere pretext for the militias’ forcible attack on Congress. Perhaps this is the position the Justice Department has to take: Otherwise, defendants accused of seditious conspiracy — conspiring to use force against the government — would be able to counter that they did not believe they were attacking the government, but rather that, at the direction of the government’s highest official, they were attacking sinister schemers who were trying to wrest control of the government by fraud.

Whatever the rationale, the fact remains that the professional investigators, who — unlike the January 6 committee — would have to prove their allegations in court, tested by cross-examination and defense counterclaims, have not accused Trump of conspiring in the violence. Perhaps the former president will eventually be indicted. The DOJ’s investigation has clearly moved its focus from the rioters to Trump’s stop-the-steal scheme. It seems homed in, however, on potential crimes arising out of the bogus legal strategy to thwart Congress’s counting of electoral votes, not the violence of the riot.

Maybe that will change. But if it does, which is unlikely, it will be because the Justice Department unearthed evidence we probably won’t learn about until charges are eventually filed. It will not owe to whatever narrative the committee stages, but does not allow to be challenged, in today’s session.