THE HOUSE COMMITTEE’S GRAND UNIFIED THEORY OF JAN. 6. You knew something was up when the leaks about the House Democrats’ Jan. 6 committee began to change. A month ago, committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin said the committee’s hearings would “blow the roof off the House.” The weeks that followed were filled with hype about the first hearing, which would be held in prime time for maximum television exposure and would be produced with showbiz expertise by a former president of ABC News.
And then came the downplaying. In an article published just hours before the hearing began, the Washington Post reported, “Committee aides sought to temper expectations of any shocking revelations during Thursday’s hearing and instead framed the session as an opening argument.” The paper quoted an anonymous committee aide saying, “A lot of this has been reported and bits and pieces of it have been shared. Our aim is to tie all that together in a comprehensive narrative.”
That’s a long way from blowing the roof off the House. And indeed, when showtime finally came Thursday night, the House roof stayed just where it was.
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As the anonymous aide said, the committee offered “bits and pieces” of information about Jan. 6. There was one bit of actual news when the committee’s Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said that Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) “contacted the White House in the weeks after Jan. 6 to seek a presidential pardon. Multiple other Republican congressmen also sought presidential pardons for their roles in attempting to overturn the 2020 election.” There have been reports about the other congressmen, but the Perry news was news, although not big enough news to justify the media hype.
The Democratic-appointed group, guided by former ABC News chief James Goldston, played a lot of video from Jan. 6 that had been breathlessly billed in media reports as “never before seen.” Indeed, some of it had not been seen, but as might have been predicted, it looked a lot like the hundreds of hours of video from Jan. 6 that have been seen.
The situation was similar to what the committee faced last year when it held its actual first hearing — a session in July 2021 devoted mainly to messaging. There was much talk about never-before-seen video then, but it turned out to be “similar to the chilling 13-minute video Democrats aired during Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial,” according to Axios. And of course, any person who is interested could have watched long video compilations created by top media organizations. So nothing in the video presented Thursday night surprised or made news. The Capitol riot included ugly and brutal scenes of protesters fighting police, and they are still ugly and brutal today.
So the news wasn’t terribly newsworthy, in the sense of revealing something not known before. And the pictures weren’t terribly new, in the sense of adding to our understanding of what took place on Jan. 6.
But the Jan. 6 committee hearing did tell us a lot about one thing: the thinking of the Jan. 6 committee. And the main focus of the committee, as revealed Thursday night, is Trump, Trump, Trump. Yes, members will look into the groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers that formed a tiny part of the crowd at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and have been charged with seditious conspiracy. But they are interested in those groups only to the extent that the committee will attempt to tie those groups directly to Trump and show that the president conspired with the groups to set off the riot as part of his plan to remain in office post-defeat.
In the big picture, what the committee will try to do is connect two separate sets of events. First is the riot. Second is the effort of a group of lawyers around Trump, led by John Eastman, who tried to come up with a way for Congress to throw out the electoral votes from enough of the states Trump lost to change the final result of the election.
The committee appears to have a Grand Unified Theory of the case, which is that Trump enlisted the rioters to cause such a disturbance that Congress would be forced to go along with the Eastman plan. It was all one giant conspiracy, hatched and executed by Trump.
The problem is, the committee will have to show a lot of connections that might not exist and are at the very least currently unknown. First, it will have to show that Trump worked with the Proud Boys and/or the Oath Keepers. Then the committee will have to show that the Proud Boys and/or the Oath Keepers actually made the Jan. 6 riot happen — a tough assignment given the apparently organic nature of the motivations of hundreds of rioters. Then they will have to show that Trump incited the riot — Democrats, of course, call it the “insurrection” — specifically to use the rioters as muscle to force Pence and Congress into accepting the Eastman electoral vote plan. The committee appears to believe it can clear that final hurdle, incitement, by showing interviews with rioters who later said they felt that Trump, using Twitter to promote his rally on Jan. 6, had personally invited them to break into the Capitol and go on a rampage.
So the committee has to prove two conspiracies, the riot conspiracy and the electoral votes conspiracy, and then show that they were actually one big conspiracy. It will be easy to convince the part of the electorate that is already inclined to believe such things. It might be much more difficult for the rest.
Part of the problem is the nature of the committee and the way that affects its work. The best congressional investigations do two things. First, they release the information they have found to the public in unedited form, as well as in the polished form of a final report. Mostly, that means releasing the transcripts of interviews. And second, they subject the evidence they have collected to an adversarial process, which in the case of a congressional investigation means both Democrats and Republicans have a chance to examine the evidence and discuss it.
The House Jan. 6 committee has done neither thing. No need to repeat the circumstances that led to the current makeup of the committee — see here for that — but the fact is, all the members were appointed by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the committee’s two Pelosi-appointed Republicans appear to be in lockstep with its seven Pelosi-appointed Democrats. We have heard reports of disagreement inside the committee about ultimate goals, for example, whether members should agitate for abolition of the Electoral College, but not about the story the committee seeks to tell.
Now, the committee has started presenting its findings. Members say the panel has interviewed around 1,000 people. That is a lot of interviews. Were they sit-down depositions, with transcripts? Were they discussions at a coffee shop, with a few scribbled notes? Were they phone conversations? Democrats, with the power of the majority, do not have to disclose such information, and so far they have not.
At the hearing, they presented just snippets of what some witnesses have said. For example, the committee presented all of 11 seconds of an interview with Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter. It presented 26 seconds of an interview with Trump adviser Jason Miller, who immediately complained that what the committee had aired incompletely represented what he had actually said.
What else did those witnesses say in their time with the committee? We don’t know. Perhaps they said something that a committee member with a different perspective, if there were one, might choose to emphasize. But we don’t know. And the majority has no obligation to reveal it. After Thursday night, we are likely to see that situation repeated in coming weeks — making it harder for Pelosi’s appointees to sell their Grand Unified Theory of Jan. 6.
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