Episode Details

Tonight is the eighth and last of the scheduled public hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack (the committee is still gathering evidence and may schedule additional hearings). So this is a good time to press the pause button and examine what the committee is accomplishing.

The committee is clearly building a criminal case against Trump and his closest enablers of seditious conspiracy, a crime defined as “conspiring to overthrow, put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States or to oppose by force the authority thereof.” I expect the committee will make a criminal referral to the Justice Department, handing over all its evidence. Ideally, Trump, along with Giuliani, Powell, Stone, Flynn, Navarro, Bannon, Meadows, and other co-conspirators, will be convicted and end up in jail.

But the Committee has a second purpose — one that has received too little attention: to stop Trump’s continuing attack on American democracy.

Even as the committee reveals Trump’s attempted coup in the months leading up to and during the January 6 attack, the attempted coup continues. Trump hasn’t stopped giving speeches to stir up angry mobs with his Big Lie — he’ll be giving another tomorrow in Arizona. Trump hasn’t stopped pushing states to alter the outcomes of the 2020 election — last week he urged Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to support a resolution that would retract Wisconsin’s 10 electoral votes cast for Biden. Trump is actively backing candidates who propound the Lie. Several prominent Republican candidates for the Senate and for governor — such as JD Vance in Ohio, Blake Masters in Arizona, and Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania — are running on it. Republican candidates across America are using increasingly violent language. Republicans lawmakers in several states are enacting legislation to take over election machinery and ignore the popular vote. Meanwhile, the lives of committee members and their families have been threatened. Witnesses are receiving gangster-style warnings not to cooperate.

The committee’s message to all of America, including Republicans: Stop supporting this treachery.

In other words, the committee’s work is not just backward-looking — revealing Trump’s attempted coup. It is also forward-looking, appealing to Americans to reject his continuing attempted coup.

In order to accomplish this, the committee is doing six important things:

First, it’s making crystal clear that the continuing attempted coup is based on a lie — which is why the committee has repeatedly shown Trump’s Attorney General William Barr, saying:

I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations [of voter fraud], but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public, that there was this systemic corruption in the system and that their votes didn't count and that these machines controlled by somebody else were actually determining it, which was complete nonsense. And it was being laid out there, and I told them that it was — that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting their time on that. And it was doing a grave disservice to the country.

Second, the committee is showing that the battle between democracy and authoritarian is non-partisan. Not only are the committee’s vice-chairman Liz Cheney and committee member Adam Kinzinger, Republican representatives, but most of the committee’s witnesses are Republicans who worked in the Trump White House or as Republican-elected state officials, or they staffed Republican legislators or served as judges appointed by Republican presidents.

All appear before the committee as American citizens who are disgusted by and worried about Trump’s attempted c