Moralist teetotalers are often the worst closet drunks, a therapist friend once said. The preacher railing against immorality on Sunday is found in a motel with a prostitute, if not an underage girl. Like so much else of the right’s posturing, behaviors they condemn the loudest in public they do themselves in secret. Those who shed shame as weakness become even bolder.
Obeying the law, telling the truth, acting with integrity and with decency. All these the right demands of others but not of its favorites. Nor of its elected leaders. Accountability, too, is for others, but not for them.
Still, a modicum of accountability began unfolding on Tuesday when, over Republican objections, the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection held its inaugural hearing. No one lit a torch, but the Accountability Games had begun.
Republican leaders who rejected a bipartisan panel declared the hearing none of them admitted watching a “sham” and a “political charade.”
Led by Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, their No. 3, they held a press conference intended to deflect attention from testimony by four police officers injured during the attack on the Capitol. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was really to blame for the Capitol breach, Stefanik insisted, and “clearly bears responsibility for not securing the US Capitol on Jan 6th – But the drooling media is too petrified to ask.” *
Inside the chamber, Officer Daniel Hodges (seen in videos pinned in a doorway and screaming in pain) was the first among the witnesses to label the mob terrorists. He used the term consistently.
The four officers demanded that the panel get to the truth of what happened that day. They wanted to know more about Donald Trump’s role in sending the mob to the Capitol steps (Washington Post):
“I feel like I went to hell and back to protect them, and too many in this room . . . are now telling me that hell doesn’t exist or hell actually wasn’t that bad,” said D.C. police officer Michael Fanone, who suffered a heart attack and concussion from being beaten and hit with a stun gun by rioters, while furiously slamming his fist on the dais. “The indifference shown to my colleagues is disgraceful.”
Other officers made clear they hold Trump partially responsible for the attack and resent what they described as his coddling of the rioters.
“To me, it’s insulting, just demoralizing because of everything that we did to prevent everyone in the Capitol from getting hurt,” said Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell. “And what he was doing, instead of sending the military, instead of sending the support or telling his people, his supporters, to stop this nonsense, he begged them to continue fighting.”
U.S. Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn summed up their hopes for the investigation:
I echo the sentiments of all of the other Officers sitting here. I use an analogy to describe what I want is a hitman. If a hitman is hired and he kills somebody, hitman goes to jail, but not only does the hitman go to jail, but the person who hired them does. There was an attack carried out on January 6th, and a hitman sent them. I want you to get to the bottom of that.
Republican opposition to this investigation left them with no Trump defenders in the room, only Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) Meaning, for the first time since Democrats took back control of the House, Slate’s Jeremy Stahl observed, “There was no deranged counternarrative being interjected every five minutes.” Stahl continued, “I can honestly say that this is the first and only time I can remember witnessing a hearing into misconduct perpetrated by Trump and his minions that maintained its presence in objective reality the whole time.” Only because professional disrupters like Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio had written themselves out of the process.
The only sideshows yesterday were Stefanik’s and the aborted stunt outside the Department of Justice by Republican Reps. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.) and several others.
Expect coming distractions by Trump, Republican officials, and Trumpists eager to avoid queries into their conduct leading up to the Jan. 6th insurrection and on the day. Jordan Tuesday night was not eager to discuss his even with Fox News:
For witnesses, there will be intimidation and threats. Officer Fanone received one by phone even as he gave his testimony.
Of all the witnesses, Fanone had insisted most he was uninterested in politics and party bickering. By Tuesday evening, his patience had worn thin.
Fanone told CNN’s Don Lemon, “This is what happens to people who tell the truth in Trump’s America.”
*To really honor her Leader-in-Exile, Stefanik should have angrily contested accounts of the Trump mob size. Officer Daniel Hodges, citing Washington Post and Carnegie Mellon University estimates, put the number of terrorists at 9,400. The terrorists themselves and their leader claimed two orders of magnitude higher.