The Jan. 6 committee, exceeding expectations, left no doubt that Donald Trump tried to stage a coup to overturn a legitimate presidential election, a months-long effort culminating in the mob assault on the Capitol.
The question is whether this moves the public opinion needle — not with the hard-core Trump faithful, but among more persuadable independents and moderate conservatives, and bolsters the likelihood the Justice Department will seek high level indictments, including the former president.
Especially damning for the former president was the taped testimony of former insiders — Attorney General Bill Barr, top aide Jason Miller, campaign lawyers, even daughter Ivanka — that Trump’s claim that massive fraud cost him the election was bogus.
He lost by 7 million votes.
The preeminent figure, though, was Liz Cheney. She brilliantly, forcefully, but calmly, laid out the narrative on how Trump had a “sophisticated seven-part plan to overturn the presidential election and prevent the transfer of presidential power.” In the annals of seminal performances at congressional hearings, the Wyoming Republican joins the likes of former Sen. Sam Ervin during Watergate or Boston lawyer Joseph Welch in the Army-McCarthy hearings.
During the assault, Cheney said, Trump was so incensed at his vice president, who courageously stood up to him and refused to reject the legitimate presidential electoral tally, that Trump said maybe Mike Pence “deserves” to be hanged.
The select committee, chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), plans five more public hearings this month. It shrewdly teased that there are other major revelations in the offing. These are expected to elaborate more on actions in the weeks leading to Jan. 6, including contacts between some of the violent extremists and the Trump inner circle.
Whether or not they affect anything, legally or politically, there have been few congressional hearings as important as these. They are about an attempted coup to sabotage American Democracy.
We learned more Thursday night about the particulars of the violent assault on the Capitol that sought to block the orderly certification of the last presidential election. The committee clearly has more about President Trump’s involvement over two months leading up to the insurrection.
And while there are major differences between this and the 1973 Sam Ervin Watergate hearings, which began the unraveling of President Nixon, these too are providing critical context of crimes. (As cited in the hearing, a federal judge already has declared that President Trump “more likely than not” committed federal felonies in trying to obstruct Congress and the election results.)
To be sure, the Trump apologists — most Republicans — preemptively launched a counterattack, charging it’s a political witch hunt. The reality is they were the ones, doing Trump’s bidding, who nixed a bipartisan independent commission.
If you’re tempted by the Trump/GOP phony claims, consider fabled journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Nixon-Watergate scandal a half century ago; they say Trump committed greater crimes than anything Nixon did. “The idea of the President of the United States trying to stage a coup is extraordinary, insidious, and we have never seen anything like it in our history,” declared Bernstein.
Likewise, Garrett Graff, author of the most comprehensive book on Richard Nixon’s offenses, “Watergate A New History,” told me it will be “much harder to bounce back from Donald Trump’s crimes against American Democracy.”
For one, he notes, today’s Republican party bears little resemblance to those predecessors like Bill Cohen, Howard Baker, Barry Goldwater who stood up to the president of their party. With rare exceptions, like Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) who are on the Jan. 6 committee, Republicans either are in the tank for Trump or scared to speak truth to his power.
Thursday night, Cheney revealed that after Jan. 6, several Republican congressmen, including Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, sought presidential pardons from Trump. That suggests they played a role in this illicit conspiracy.
These Republicans are following their rank and file. Some 60 percent of Republicans say the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol was not “very violent.” As an idiotic football coach said, it merely was a “dust up.” A half-dozen people died, hundreds were injured, and there was hundreds of millions of dollars of destruction.
The media — not just Trump’s right-wing boosters, but the mainstream media — too often debases the gravity of the crisis, treating it like a sporting event, who’s up and who’s down, or it’s all about the midterm elections, or snarky cynicism, everybody does it, or focusing on television ratings. A columnist for the New York Times wrote, before the hearings began, that the committee “has already blown it,” with a “small minded” focus on what happened rather than on protecting it from happening again.
Of course, it’s impossible to erect future safeguards without specific knowledge about what occurred and some consensus on how to fix it. That’s a tall order for the committee; it would be a travesty not to try.
Watching closely will be the Department of Justice, which has convened a Jan. 6 grand jury, convicted or gotten guilty pleas from over 100 defendants and indicted five members of the Proud Boys, a Trump-supporting, neo-fascist hate group, for engaging in a violent “seditious conspiracy” on Jan. 6.
Justice probably has most of the intelligence the committee possesses. But some new information and context may well facilitate subsequent indictments.
Al Hunt is the former executive editor of Bloomberg News. He previously served as reporter, bureau chief and Washington editor for The Wall Street Journal. For almost a quarter century he wrote a column on politics for The Wall Street Journal, then The International New York Times and Bloomberg View. He hosts Politics War Room with James Carville. Follow him on Twitter @AlHuntDC.