The Jan. 6 Committee is meeting 1 more time — here's what you need to know

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published 17 December 2022

Congress' bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol is set to hold its final public meeting on Monday, bringing to an end nearly a year-and-a-half of investigations into former President Donald Trump's attempt to foment an insurrection and overturn his 2020 electoral loss. Since it was first empaneled in the summer of 2021, the Committee's seven Democratic and two Republican members have methodically presented a compelling narrative pointing to Trump himself at the center of a vast, coordinated effort to disrupt the normal business of Congress for his own benefit. In a series of public hearings and witness testimonials, as well as through a trail of court filing tea leaves rife for interpretation and extrapolation, the committee's work has arguably become the definitive accounting of the events of Jan. 6 for many, even as the former president and his network of allies work to counteract and dismiss the groups' findings.

This final hearing — dubbed a "business meeting" by the committee — will be followed by a full, official report on Wednesday, the contents of which will be voted on for approval during the Monday session. According to co-chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the exact content of the final meeting was, as of last week, still being hashed out among the committee members, but once the final report is approved, it will be made available on the group's congressional website. Here's everything you need to know:

From the start, the Jan. 6 Committee's mere existence has been a contentious issue in Congress, where Trump's hold over the GOP has reigned — and remained — supreme in the months and years since the insurrection itself. Formed as the result of a largely party-line vote in the House, the committee's sole Republican participants, Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wy.) were ultimately censured by their own party for being a part of the proceedings. Still, despite the broader conservative rancor over the committee's mere existence, Cheney and Kinzinger's presence afforded the investigation a sense of patriotic unity — one that was repeatedly invoked during the committee's public hearings as part of a larger effort to elevate the proceedings above jejune partisanship.

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Over the course of 10 public hearings held predominantly through the spring and summer of 2022, the committee explored different aspects of the events of, and antecedents to, the Jan. 6 insurrection, including: efforts by Trump and his allies to knowingly spread false allegations about the 2020 election; a campaign to push the Justice Department to back his election falsehoods; and, in perhaps the most dramatic session, descriptions of the former president's private behavior as the attack on the Capitol was taking place.

The committee also made a series of legal maneuvers to compel testimony from a number of unwilling potential witnesses, going so far as to recommend former top Trump official Steve Bannon be held in contempt of Congress for refusing a subpoena from the group. Bannon was later found guilty. Most recently, the committee voted to subpoena Trump himself, eliciting a more than 100-page response from the former president, which opened by reiterating the debunked claim that "the presidential election of 2020 was rigged and stolen!" To date, Trump has yet to testify before the committee's investigators.

Quite a bit. Outside of Congress' investigation into Trump's role in the Jan. 6 attack, the former president has faced a series of other, unrelated legal challenges over the past year as well: the FBI's search of his Mar-a-Lago compound in August was perhaps the most visible example of Trump's ongoing legal peril, serving as both the culmination of — and kickstarting a renewed focus on — his fight with the government over the ownership and storage of classified material. The Justice Department is also conducting its own parallel investigation into the Jan. 6 insurrection, with both cases being overseen by recently appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith.

Not only has Trump himself been increasingly exposed to potential legal consequences outside the scope of the Jan. 6 committee, but his business empire has, as well. Earlier this month the former president's eponymous Trump Organization was found guilty in New York of tax fraud and numerous other financial crimes — a sign that the various state and local level investigations into Trump and his network may ultimately be just as consequential as those taking place on the federal level.

Beyond the legal front, Trump's soft power within the GOP has eroded considerably over the course of the committee's investigations. While the former president still enjoys a seemingly unbreakable grip on the party's core MAGA base, the poor performance of Trump-backed candidates in last month's midterm elections, coupled with his own stagnating re-election campaign, has renewed the possibility that the GOP as a whole may be prepared to move on from Trump — even as it continues to hunger for Trumpism.

While the exact agenda for Monday's final Jan. 6 commission meeting remains a secret, co-chair Thompson has stated that there will be criminal referrals made as part of the committee's effort to conclude their investigation — an admission that later prompted an official statement from the group, saying "the committee has determined that referrals to outside entities should be considered as a final part of its work." Whether those considerations will, as Thompson predicted, result in actual referrals remains to be seen (when asked by a reporter whether Trump himself is under consideration for a criminal referral, Thompson replied simply, "good try.") According to Thompson, there are five or six different categories of referrals the committee is preparing to explore, ranging from criminal prosecution to less dramatic cases of campaign finance misdealings and House Ethics complaints.

Ultimately, the fate of the Jan. 6 committee, and its lasting legacy, remains entirely up in the air. With an incoming Republican majority House, it seems fairly clear that the group itself will be disbanded, and perhaps even subjected to partisan attacks, with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) threatening this past June that "one of our first priorities is going to be launching a full investigation into Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Select Committee's circus."

Should the commitee make criminal referrals to the DOJ, or other adjudicating bodies, the onus to act would then be in the hands of those institutions themselves. While some — like Garland's Justice Department — seem at least open to pursuing criminal prosecution of former President Trump and his associates, it's hard to imagine complaints made to the House Ethics committee being acted on by a GOP majority that has increasingly accepted, and even embraced, the events of Jan. 6.

The committee's legacy, then, may ultimately be more a question of influencing the national narrative than one of concrete consequences. "I don't think that we should measure the Jan. 6 committee's success in terms of whether it changes people's minds, because at this point, the partisanship is essentially so baked in that we can't expect that it will," Bookings Institution fellow and Lawfareblog.com editor Quinta Jurecic told The Hill recently.

"That was simply an impossible metric," Jurecic continued. "I do think that it has been extraordinarily successful if you define success in other ways. It's been successful in uncovering new facts about Jan. 6. I think it has shown us evidence that Trump was far more personally and closely involved with efforts to contest and overturn the election and then with the violence on Jan. 6 than we knew — just a degree of personal involvement that simply wasn't in the public record before the committee carried out this work. That is huge."

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Rafi Schwartz has worked as a politics writer at The Week since 2022, where he covers elections, Congress and the White House. He was previously a contributing writer with Mic focusing largely on politics, a senior writer with Splinter News, a staff writer for Fusion's news lab, and the managing editor of Heeb Magazine, a Jewish life and culture publication. Rafi's work has appeared in Rolling Stone, GOOD and The Forward, among others.