THE JANUARY 6TH REPORT
by Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol
The long-awaited congressional report featuring a context-shaping introduction by one of the House committee’s principal members.
According to the committee, which continues to release supporting material before being dissolved in January 2023, Donald Trump stood at the center of the insurrection. “Potus im sure is loving this,” texted one Trump aide in the middle of the melee—and it certainly seemed like he was. The assault had many dimensions, with a campaign of lawsuits, election denial, and attempts to strong-arm state officials to break the law and find him more votes. Then there were the Republican legislators who aided and abetted Trump. As Vice Chair Liz Cheney writes, “Part of the tragedy of January 6th is the conduct of those who knew that what happened was profoundly wrong, but nevertheless tried to downplay it, minimize it or defend those responsible.” The report exhaustively details the coordinated attempt to install Trump by coup, from those pliant Republicans to the paramilitary groups that assembled to storm the Capitol. In the foreword to this edition, Adam Schiff, a prosecutor in the Trump impeachments and committee member, observes that the effort to overturn the election might have succeeded if Kevin McCarthy had been Speaker of the House and not Nancy Pelosi, who offered a bipartisan committee but rejected McCarthy’s choices for Republican members, among them Trump acolytes Jim Jordan and Jim Banks, who “would have turned the proceedings into a cynical circus.” Schiff singles out White House staffer Cassidy Hutchinson for her brave testimony, which helped establish that Trump knew that the mob was armed but believed that “the attack was justified, even when it put the life of his own vice president, Mike Pence, in danger.” Schiff fully endorses bringing Trump to trial, recognizing that while doing so has attendant perils, “not doing so is far more dangerous.”
The report’s findings are shocking, and Schiff does good work in highlighting the worst of them and what needs to be done.