The crucial thing the House Jan. 6 committee knows about Trump that we don't

The House Jan. 6 committee has been working quickly and quietly to get the granular details of what happened on and leading up to the violent Capitol insurrection a year ago today. We already know a lot about what happened last Jan. 6 from investigators, prosecutors, and journalists, "eye-popping vignettes about a president obsessed with subverting his own defeat, and a mob willing to do his bidding at nearly any cost," Kyle Cheney writes at Politico.

The evidence we have is "voluminous" and "devastating," Cheney writes. "President Donald Trump, glued to his television as violent supporters ransacked the Capitol, ignored increasingly frantic efforts by his aides and his own children to call off the assault." But "the committee wants to tell the full story of Trump's actions, interactions, and refusals to act during a 187-minute timeframe between calling his allies to march to the Capitol and telling them to go home," Axios reports. And they know more than we do.

"The most explosive details they may be sitting on could, on the surface, be the most mundane," Cheney points out. "That's because the committee, unlike the rest of us, knows precisely what time key texts were sent and urgent pleas went ignored. Where those messages fit in the already-known timeline of Trump's movements on Jan. 6 could be among the panel's more crucial findings." He laid out several examples where knowing the precise time Trump communicated with somebody really matters in understanding his culpability for the insurrection.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

In her two voluntary sit-downs with the Jan. 6 committee, former Mike Pence press secretary Alyssa Farah told Axios, "you could see how much information they already had." The witnesses not cooperating, she added, will soon be "realizing the committee has quite a bit more information than they realized. And their involvement is known to a much greater degree than they realized."