The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans to begin holding public hearings in the new year to tell the story of the insurrection from start to finish while crafting an ample interim report on its findings by summer, as it shifts into a more public phase of its work.
The panel will continue to collect information and seek testimony from willing witnesses and those who have been reluctant — a group that now includes Republican members of Congress. It is examining whether to recommend that the Justice Department pursue charges against anyone, including former president Donald Trump, and whether legislative proposals are needed to help prevent valid election results from being overturned in the future.
“We have to address it — our families, our districts and our country demand that we get as much of the causal effects of what occurred and come up with some recommendations for the House so that it won’t ever happen again,” committee Chairman Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) said in a recent interview.
The committee has taken in a massive amount of data — interviewing more than 300 witnesses, announcing more than 50 subpoenas, obtaining more than 35,000 pages of records and receiving hundreds of telephone leads through the Jan. 6 tip line, according to aides familiar with the matter who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe details of the panel’s work.
The panel has made splashy headlines with its aggressive legal posture toward former White House aides Stephen K. Bannon and Mark Meadows and the possibility it could recommend the Justice Department investigate Trump for his role in the attack and efforts to overturn the election results.
Trump and Republican leaders have opposed an investigation into the attack from the start and have called the committee’s work a partisan exercise meant to damage the former president and the GOP ahead of the midterms. If Republicans were to take control of the House after November’s elections, they would almost certainly shut down the probe.
This has added a sense of urgency to the panel’s work, including the need for hearings and to show that the information gathered amounts to more than what is already publicly known.
The public business meeting earlier this month, where panel members revealed a sliver of the 9,000 documents and records provided by Meadows, was a taste of what it hopes to accomplish in hearings throughout 2022: a dramatic presentation of the behind-the-scenes maneuvering by Trump, his allies and anyone involved in the attack or the attempt to overturn the election results.
“We want to tell it from start to finish over a series of weeks, where we can bring out the best witnesses in a way that makes the most sense,” a senior committee aide said. “Our legacy piece and final product will be the select committee’s report.”
The rough timeline being discussed among senior committee staffers includes public hearings starting this winter and stretching into spring, followed by an interim report in the summer and a final report ahead of November’s elections.
“I think we may issue a couple reports and I would hope for a [full] interim report in the summer, with the eye towards maybe another — I don’t know if it’d be final or another interim report later in the fall,” said a second senior committee aide.
The five teams behind the investigation have begun to merge their findings. The topics include: the money and funding streams for the “Stop the Steal” rallies and events; the misinformation campaign and online extremist activity; how agencies across the government were preparing for the Jan. 6 rally; the pressure campaigns to overturn the election results or delay the electoral certification; and the organizers of the various events and plans for undermining the election.
That sounds promising, particularly the pressure campaigns which implicate the White House.
This seems beyond the scope of this committee but who know? Maybe they’ll come up with something interesting:
Investigators said they are also pursuing questions outside of these lanes, including how Trump has been able to convince so many of his supporters that the election was stolen despite having no evidence to support that claim.
“I think that Trump and his team have done a pretty masterful job of exploiting millions of Americans,” said the second senior committee aide. “How do you get that many people screwed up that deeply? And continue to screw them up? Right? And what do we do about that? So there are some big, big-picture items that go well beyond the events of [Jan. 6] that the committee is also grappling with.”
This strikes me as perhaps the most important consequence of this investigation:
Investigators have consulted with experts as they attempt to understand what might have happened if the electoral count was not completed that day and “we ended up in a constitutional gray zone,” said the first senior committee staffer.
With this in mind, the panel is expected to recommend legislative and administrative changes. Members have begun reviewing the Electoral Count Act, the 19th century law that dictates the procedure for counting electoral votes during a joint session of Congress. Legal scholars across the political spectrum have said the law is in need of reform.
In addition, members of the panel have said they plan to review laws that provide a president with emergency powers, so those powers cannot be abused if a future election is contested.
This is where the anomaly of Trump himself comes in. These weaknesses have always been there it’s just that it took a shameless, narcissistic, pathological liar in the White House to actually exploit them. And, needless to say, a political party so power mad that they are running with it now that they’ve been revealed.
The laws must be reformed because there is simply no doubt that Trump and many Republican politicians are prepared to do whatever it takes to overturn legitimate elections in the future.
I look forward to the public hearings. I just hope they are able to present them in a compelling way without a lot of the usual grandstanding. So far, the committee has shown itself to be a serious body and without the wingnuts on the right turning them into the usual circus, they might just break through.