(Dobbs) The Value of the January 6th Hearings

Anything that erodes Trump's appeal is a gift to the nation.

“A staggering betrayal of his oath.”

That is how the January 6th Committee chairman Bennie Thompson today summarized ex-President Donald Trump’s actions, and inactions, before, during, and after the insurrection.

Truer words were never spoken.

As witness after witness told the committee, almost all of them on video and, as Thompson pointed out, "almost entirely Republicans,” Trump knew that his claims about a rigged election were a lie. As early as July 2020, four months before the election, Trump told people close to him, according to his former campaign manager Brad Parscale, that he would declare victory on election day, regardless of the actual results. And that’s what he did. Then, of course, he continued to tell what January 6th Committee member Elaine Luria rightly called “purposeful lies,” about more absentee votes than ballots, about suitcases smuggled into counting stations, even after his attorney general had told him none of it was true. And even after more than 60 judges rejected the phantom evidence his supporters could not produce, one federal magistrate calling it “nothing but speculation and conjecture.” All part of what Chairman Thompson described as “a multi-part plan… to overturn the 2020 election.” And why? As former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows’s aide Cassidy Hutchinson said, quoting the then-president, “I don’t want people to know we lost.”

What’s more, on January 6th itself, Trump knew from law enforcement intelligence that the army of acolytes he had summoned to the nation’s capital would be armed. One Secret Service email actually warned as January 6th loomed, "Their plan is to literally kill people.” Trump’s abettance is affirmed after his senior advisor Stephen Miller texted, “Fired up the base,” and thousands of violent threats started circulating online— threats that lawmakers might leave the Capitol “in a bodybag,” that his followers were “ready and armed, Mr. President,” that the Oath Keepers were “Standing at the ready should POTUS require assistance,” even that “Gallows don’t require electricity.” The assistant to Trump’s Chief of Staff told the committee, the president was actually angry at the Secret Service for barring armed supporters that morning from his rally. After all, these were his people. “I’d love it if they could be allowed to come up here with us,” he told the crowd. That would explain why, according to several of his aides, he sat for two hours and 40 minutes watching the violent insurrection on TV without lifting a finger before fecklessly tweeting for his people to go home.

In the meantime, video at today’s final pubic hearing showed Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell huddled together with others in the Congressional leadership, pleading by phone for help. Help from the Defense Department, help from the National Guard, help from the local police. Leaders from both parties that day were doing what Donald Trump declined to do.

It is a stunning fact that Chairman Thompson pointed out today, that “all of this evidence” about Donald Trump’s culpability “came almost entirely from Republicans.” Unlike the unaccountable alternative facts that anyone can propagate without penalty, these were Republicans under oath.

And however reluctant some might have been to testify, it has been a big cast of Republicans, with big names, incriminating Trump.

Like his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, his former Attorney General Bill Barr, his former Transportation Secretary (and wife of Mitch McConnell) Elaine Chao, his former Labor Secretary (and son of the late ultra-conservative Supreme Court justice) Eugene Scalia, his former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney, his former White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, his former campaign managers Parscale and Bill Stepien, his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany. For all we know, Ivanka and Jared aren’t even Republicans, but however hesitant they must have been, they too, under oath, implicated the former president.

Of course there were others from Trump’s circle who refused to talk. Former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, longtime confidante Roger Stone, conspiracy-pushing lawyer John Eastman, former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. They all took the Fifth. Former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon and former advisor Peter Navarro refused to show up at all. If there is justice, they will pay for their contempt of Congress.

These hearings have painted a picture of an egomaniacal loser who just couldn’t bear to admit he lost, and would put the country through hell to perpetuate the pretense. 

But that’s not the end of it, nor should it be. As committee co-chair Liz Cheney said at the beginning of today’s hearing, “Without accountability, it all becomes normal, and will recur.” There have been roughly 900 prosecutions so far against insurrectionists at the Capitol, but as Cheney also put it, “Our nation cannot only punish the foot soldiers.”

That helps explain the coda to the hearing, a vote to subpoena Donald Trump himself. If history is any guide, he will fight it with every resource at his command and drag out the fight in the hope that Trumpian Republicans take the House in November and put the committee, and its final report, out of business. 

But the publicity from the hearings itself, and the repercussions of Congress subpoenaing a former president, might bring their own reward. A poll by Reuters/Ipsos, just before the committee’s final Summer hearing in July, showed that the number of Republicans who believe Trump was at least partly to blame for the insurrection had gone up 7% since the month before.

So it’s conceivable that after today, the percentage turning on Trump will rise again. The man who so staggeringly betrayed his oath deserves nothing less.

Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.