Washington: In its first of six public hearing on the January 6 insurrection, the US House select committee investigating the episode pinned the blame on then-president Donald Trump for instigating a lie that the election was stolen, encouraging a mob to attack the US Capitol to disrupt Congress from certifying Joe Biden as president, and failing to act to protect Congress when it was under siege.
This “multi-step conspiracy” and “attempted coup”, the committee leaders said, was the first time in American history when a president had actively sought to halt the peaceful transfer of power.
Chaired by Democratic leader Bennie Thompson, with Republican leader Liz Cheney — a rare dissenter from the GOP who consistently opposed Trump’s unconstitutional moves and called out her own party colleagues for their stance — as the vice-chair, the committee hearings were broadcast live on prime time on Thursday night in the US.
The hearing was interspersed with clips that showed the sequence of events on January 6, including harrowing images of a mob of Proud Boys, a right wing extremist group, assaulting security personnel and vandalising the Congress. The panel also played video testimonies of a range of White House staffers who exposed Trump’s obduracy, despite being told there wasn’t enough ground to contest the electoral outcome, and a recorded testimony of his daughter Ivanka Trump who said she believed the Attorney General William Barr when he said that there wasn’t evidence to suggest that the election was stolen.
Additionally, a filmmaker who was embedded with mob during the attack and a security official who was attacked on the day testified in person.
Kicking off the hearings, Thompson, D-Miss, said that he came from a part of the country where people still justified slavery, and those who defended the January 6 insurrectionists reminded him of this dark history. He said it was important to not see this as a politically partisan panel, referring to the diversity of representation in the committee, and reminded the audience that they had all taken an oath to defend the US Constitution from both “foreign and domestic enemies”.
“This was out to test on January 6,” he said.
Although, Thompson said, Trump was well within his rights to approach the courts with his claims of a stolen election, the fact that most of his five dozen cases contesting the election results filed across the country were dismissed, should have been the end of the line for Trump. Instead, for the former president, it was the beginning of a conspiracy to subvert popular will.
The attacks put 250 years of American constitutional democracy at risk, he said.
“The world is watching. America is a beacon of hope and freedom, a model for others. But how can we play that role when our house is in disorder?” Addressing this required confronting truth with candour, resolve and determination. “That begins here”.
However, the star of the evening was Liz Cheney, the daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney and Trump’s fiercest critic within Republican ranks. Emphasising that it was not a spontaneous riot, Cheney laid out how in the second hearing, the committee would provide evidence on how Trump and his advisers knew he had lost the election, and yet ignored the court rulings, advice of campaign leadership, and the White House staff to spend millions of campaign funds on his misinformation campaign. This is when the clip from Ivanka’s deposition, accepting that there was no evidence of fraud and that her father had lost the 2020 election, was played.
In the third hearing, the committee will focus on Trump’s attempts to influence the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pressure the states by suggesting that there were significant concerns about the election. In this, he was encouraged by a set of Republican Congress leaders who then sought presidential pardons.
In the fourth hearing, the committee plans to focus on Trump’s relationship with vice-president Mike Pence, who had the job of certifying the votes and was facing direct pressure from Trump to resist doing so. Pence refused to abide by the president’s call.
The fifth hearing, Cheney said, would show Trump’s direct pressure on state governors and elected officials to undermine the results. And the final two hearings would document in detail the actual attack on the Capitol, and Trump’s refusal, despite the pleas of his staff, family, and Republican Congressional leadership, to step in to protect the Congress.
“I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. Trump will be gone one day, but your dishonor will remain.”
The committee hearings also saw testimonies by Caroline Edwards, an officer who was injured on the day, calling it “carnage and chaos”, and filmmaker, Nick Quested, who had followed Proud Boys and tracked their plans to attack the Capitol.
The Democrats hope that the public hearings will, in the run up to midterm elections in November, remind the electorate of the dangers American democracy faces from the far-right, within and outside the Republican Party. Moderate Republicans, like Cheney, hope it will force a course correction in the Republican Party. But opinion polls, as well as results in recent Republican primaries, indicate that Trump’s popularity within the Party’s base remains intact, and a large number of Republicans continue to believe that the election was “stolen” with the Republican Congressional leadership — which obstructed the formation of an independent commission to investigate the insurrection in 2021 — not wishing to antagonise Trump or his supporters.
