The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol conducted its final hearing on Monday, concurrently with the release of a preliminary summary of its final report. (The full report is to be released today.) As political theater it was a ho-hum event: nothing new, no bombshell revelations, no smoking guns. The big news, supposedly, was the Committee’s conclusion that former President Donald J. Trump committed several federal crimes in connection with the Capitol Hill riot, among them incitement to insurrection. Therse charges were referred to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.
Let it be stipulated that in the course of its investigation the Committee did some good work. Its final report shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Donald Trump bears primary moral responsibility for the riot, and that his election denialism was a political crime without precedent in American history. Trump’s post-election behavior in 2020 removed any shadow of a doubt that he is unfit for any political office—not just the presidency but municipal commissioner of sanitation. But the Committee’s criminal referrals to the Justice Department constituted a tell. They were unnecessary, gratuitous, a reminder that the Committee’s investigation was a partisan political exercise designed to serve the interests of the Democratic Party.
The most serious criminal charge leveled by the Committee against Trump is incitement to insurrection. This tracks with the Democratic/progressive talking point to the effect that the January 6th riot was just that: a Trump-inspired attempt to overthrow the United States government. If this were true, we might have expected to see multiple prosecutions of participants in the riot on just that charge. But of the more than 800 individuals indicted or prosecuted so far, not one of them has been charged with a violation of 18 USC 2383: Rebellion or insurrection.
The charge that Trump incited an insurrection is therefore frivolous, and the other three criminal referrals appear less than compelling. Furthermore, the Committee’s attempt to put Trump at the head of an insurrectionary conspiracy runs counter to the Justice Department’s strategy in its prosecution of January 6th participants. Aware that there is no evidence to that effect, federal prosecutors scarcely mention Trump. They realize that to do so would aid the defendants, enabling them to claim that they were acting at the behest of the President of the United States. As noted above, Trump does bear moral and political responsibility for the events of that day, the proper remedy for which is impeachment and removal from office. But though Trump was impeached in the aftermath of January 6th, House Democrats made no serious attempt to prosecute their case. In two words, they punted.
The fact that Trump supplied the Committee with so many branches of low-hanging fruit has tended to obscure its hyper-partisan composition. The responsibility for this lies with soon-to-be-former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who rejected two of the GOP minority’s nominees for the Committee on the grounds that they were biased in favor of Trump. This gave House Republicans all the excuse they needed to wash their hands of the whole business—which they did. Pelosi went on to pick a couple of rabidly anti-Trump Republicans to serve, no doubt hoping to project an appearance of bipartisanship. But bias is bias, whether for or against Trump, and it cannot be denied that the Committee as constituted by the Speaker was nothing more than a radically biased hanging jury—some of whose Democratic members have their own history of election denialism.
Assuming that the Justice Department is working toward an indictment of Trump on matters related to January 6th, the Committee’s criminal referrals can only complicate the issue. Prosecuting a former president who is also an announced candidate for the presidency in 2024 would be an iffy proposition in the most favorable of circumstances, and the input of a clearly partisan congressional committee is no help at all. It would make the supposedly independent Justice Department look like it’s doing the bidding of the Democratic Party and the Biden reelection campaign—and that would be a gift to Trump.
The House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol could have made an important contribution toward the stabilization of the American political system, which has been so deranged by the events of the last eight years. But thanks to the House Democrats’ determination to play political games with a serious issue, it only made a bad situation marginally worse. So thanks for nothing, Madam Speaker & Co.