The House select committee on the Capitol insurrection has a duty far beyond investigating one of the most traumatic days in US history. Its wider mission is to expose and catalog an assault on democracy that is still going on.
The panel holds its first prime-time televised hearing Thursday in a bid to imprint the implications of this national nightmare — when a mob incited by then-President Donald Trump tried to prevent the certification of 2020 election results — on the minds of citizens.
It plans to show previously unseen video of testimony by former aides to Trump, campaign officials and members of Trump’s family.
Committee aides said they will also roll video of the horrific scenes when pro-Trump rioters smashed their way into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021, beating up police officers and sending lawmakers running for safety.
“We’ll bring the American people back to the reality of that violence and remind them of just how horrific it was,” one aide said.
The panel, which holds its first prime-time televised hearing Thursday in a bid to imprint the implications of this national nightmare on the minds of citizens, has often been compared to the Senate Watergate committee of the 1970s.
In a climactic moment of those televised hearings that transfixed the nation, former White House counsel John Dean told of how he had informed disgraced President Richard Nixon that there was “a cancer” growing on the presidency. Fifty years later, as Washington still reels from the mendacity of another aberrant president, Trump, that cancer is attached to, and is still growing on, democracy itself.
The House committee set out to expose the truth about Trump’s broad plot to tarnish the 2020 election with false claims of voter fraud. House Republicans are so determined to prevent the American people from learning that truth that they are working to discredit the committee with a public relations assault.
On Thursday and in weeks of subsequent hearings the panel is under fierce pressure to establish the depth of Trump’s apparent conspiracy. Its work so far suggests it plans to prove that the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob was not simply a rally that got out of hand but was the culmination of weeks of chicanery to subvert a free election by a President who called a crowd to Washington and incited an uprising against the American experiment itself.
The committee is racing against the clock, since Republicans who are whitewashing Trump’s role as they seek to win back the House in midterm elections are sure to end its investigation.
But in weeks of behind-the-scenes interviews that have reached deep into Trump’s West Wing, the committee has sought to establish, for example, the level of planning of the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, and whether there were direct links between the ex-President’s circle and partisan groups like the Proud Boys. Some leaders of the far-right extremist organization were this week charged by the Justice Department with seditious conspiracy in a bid to fracture the democratic transfer of power. Thursday’s hearing will feature testimony of two people who interacted with the group in early 2021.
The hearings are also expected to stress the extraordinary breadth of the attempt to subvert the election, from Trump’s efforts to “find” votes to overturn his loss in Georgia to the extraordinary, and often hair-brained, schemes being pushed by Trump legal associates revealed in hundreds of text messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows that have been obtained by CNN. While the committee has no powers to lay criminal charges, it could recommend prosecutions of Trump or acolytes in a move that would place the Justice Department in the eye of a political storm in election year.
The tumultuous political backdrop adds an extra layer of tension to Thursday’s big television showpiece.
It would be one thing if the investigation was uncovering the plots and schemes and misdemeanors that took place during a tragedy that was in the past. But the ex-President is still spreading his lies about a stolen election. Many of those who are defending him, including GOP leaders in the House, want to stay in his good graces as they seek a return to power. And Trump is considering another White House campaign that might use the very same anti-democratic methods to claim a new term in office that would likely be more autocratic than the first.
“We are in fact in a situation where he continues to use even more extreme language, frankly, than the language that caused the attack,” committee member Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, told CBS News in an interview this week.
“And so, people must pay attention. People must watch, and they must understand how easily our democratic system can unravel if we don’t defend it.”
