Washington is abuzz with speculation as the House Select Committee to Investigate the 6 January attack on the US Capitol held its first public hearing in nearly a year.
The congressional investigation is looking into the potential culpability of former president Donald Trump and other senior Republicans for the violent insurrection following the election of President Biden in 2020.
The first of two scheduled hearings took place yesterday, with another due on Monday, and others are likely to follow throughout the summer.
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Yesterday’s proceedings opened with a series of videos featuring Trump aides testifying that his claims of a stolen election were false. The panel “laid out in meticulous detail the extent of the former president’s efforts to keep himself in office,” The New York Times (NYT) reported.
There is fevered expectation as to what the House select committee might hear and what the consequences might be for those involved, not least the former president himself.
Jail or fines for Trump
The most serious penalty the former president could face is a jail term, but that is unlikely.
Trump and many of his former associates have so far refused to collaborate with the hearing, creating a dilemma for investigators.
The House select committee has the power to “imprison or fine any person for defying a subpoena for documents or testimony”, Bruce Fein, who was associate deputy attorney general under President Reagan, wrote for The Hill. Yet so far it has declined to deploy those powers, which Fein said is “inexplicable” and exhibits a “cowardliness (that) will not save the country”.
Consequently, those hoping to see Trump behind bars may be disappointed by the hearing’s refusal to “play its unused trump cards”.
The midterms
The hearings are unfolding as both major parties hold their primary polls five months before the 2022 midterm elections, in which the Democrats’ slender majority is at stake.
Joe Biden’s party holds the narrowest of majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, so any political miscalculation could hobble the second half of his four-year term. The Senate is now tied with 50 members for each party and the Democrats holding the tie-breaker in Vice-President Kamala Harris. In the House, a swing in just half a dozen seats could tip control from Democrats to Republicans.
“How this plays out in the primaries is really hard to say because this news can break both ways,” Patrick Egan, associate professor of politics and public policy at New York University, told USA Today.
Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communication at American University, agreed, saying the impact of the hearings may end up being negligible on the midterms because Trump supporters tend to explain away criticisms levelled at him.
“Individuals who are kind of the die-hard Trump supporters, they almost see him as a reduction sauce of what they want to support and they don’t see that same level in those that he endorses,” Braddock said.
The Trump clan
The ordinarily tight Trump family has shown signs of strain over the past year and a half. In the hours and days after polls closed in 2020, his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner “were already washing their hands of the Trump presidency”.
According to the NYT, barely 24 hours after Trump claimed in the middle of the night that “frankly, we did win this election”, the “power couple” who had spent the previous four years building the foundations of political careers of their own in Washington made the snap decision to leave town. “We’re moving to Miami,” Kushner told his wife.
Now, they are “silently renouncing Trump”, New York magazine says. “In the most Javanka-y move imaginable, they are now distancing themselves from the last three months of the Trump administration, suggesting via an anonymously sourced news report that they always knew that whole insurrection business was wrong, but there was simply nothing they could do.”
Their efforts to distance themselves became a little more obvious during yesterday’s hearing, when Ivanka Trump expressly backed ex-attorney general William Barr’s pronouncement that her father’s claims of election fraud were “bullshit”.
Ivanka Trump told the committee: “I respect Attorney General Barr so I accepted what he was saying”.
Trump’s base
The principal goal of the hearings is simple, said The Atlantic: provide a narrative for what happened on the day in question. But the underlying aim is “larger and more diffuse”: the committee will show Americans “how involved President Donald Trump was, and why we should care about one party’s complete and utter rejection of democratic norms”.
This, of course, will be “no easy task”. In the 17 months since 6 January 2021, Americans on the right have “hardened against reality”, the publication said. When polled in January this year, 32% of American adults said that Trump had “no responsibility” for the riot that day.
However, it is still possible the hearings may “penetrate the right-wing echo chamber”, the Atlantic concluded, which may be enough “to change hearts and minds”.
