(Dobbs) What Are These Republicans Trying To Hide?
They want to whitewash the January 6th investigation. It's working.
Back in the days of Watergate, when H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman, and John Dean were put on trial for obstruction of justice in the service of President Richard Nixon, should Nixon have been seated on their juries? When Bernie Madoff was tried for bilking thousands of investors out of tens of billions of dollars, should the employees who conspired with him have been asked to sit on his? If Donald Trump is indicted for financial misdeeds, should his organization’s CFO Allen Weisselberg sit in the jury box?
Of course not.
So why would— why should— House Speaker Nancy Pelosi place two of Trump’s most emphatic enablers on the panel investigating the attack and insurrection of January 6th, especially when fingers will undoubtedly, unavoidably— and from where I sit, validly— point in the direction of Trump himself?
She shouldn’t.
But the Republican leader of the House, Kevin McCarthy, who once angrily declared that Trump “bears responsibility for the attack,” yesterday pointed his finger not at Trump for authoritarian abuses of power but instead at Pelosi, after she rejected two of his five nominees to the panel. “Why,” he asked of House Democrats, “are you allowing a lame-duck speaker to destroy this institution?”
As if he and some of his own members haven’t been doing all they can to destroy it themselves.
The nominees Pelosi turned down? Representative Jim Jordan, who already had repudiated the panel, calling it a “political attack” on Donald Trump and who, what’s more, might himself be called as a material witness (as might McCarthy himself). And Representative Jim Banks, who said in a statement four days ago that the panel was only created to “malign conservatives and to justify the Left’s authoritarian agenda.”
Do these guys sound like they’d try to get to the bottom of the insurrection?
Of course not.
To the contrary, since the truth is not bound to be pretty, they don’t even want to know. McCarthy made that clear when he called the whole panel “a sham process” and declared, “There's one fundamental question that I hope Democrats will actually answer and address and that is why wasn't there a proper security presence that day?”
THAT’S THE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION??? How come someone wasn’t prepared to stop the insurrection?
How about this one instead: How come someone started it? Who organized it, who encouraged it, who let it fester?
These people aren’t just garden-variety hypocrites. If the English language had a stronger word for hypocrisy, they would be the textbook definition of it.
We have seen from the get-go that the Party of Trump has done its best to torpedo any investigation. At the end of May, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell led his members in a filibuster to kill an independent commission that would have investigated the Capitol riot. Forget the fact that a majority of senators, including a handful of Republicans, voted to proceed. Under the rules of the Senate, McConnell’s minority of 35 prevailed.
And then came McCarthy.
Three of the five representatives he nominated to Pelosi’s panel, including Jordan and Banks, voted on January 6th— before the smoke had even cleared after the atrocious attempt to overthrow the government— against certifying Joe Biden’s electoral victory. Would anyone call McCarthy’s cynical selections a serious effort to dig into the insurrection?
Outcast Republican Liz Cheney doesn’t think so. “At every opportunity,” she said yesterday, “the minority leader has attempted to prevent the American people from understanding what happened, to block this investigation.”
Cheney will serve on the panel, but if she’s the only Republican with the guts, it will be hard to genuinely call it bipartisan. That’s not Nancy Pelosi’s fault. She gave the Republicans an honest opportunity. McCarthy dismissed it. By putting forward members who arguably bear some blame for what happened at the Capitol, including some of the most rabid apologists for Donald Trump and the most vocal promoters of the Big Lie, McCarthy knew what the outcome would be. Exactly what he wanted. Feigning distress and drowning in denial, he picked up his toys and went home, vowing to “instead pursue our own investigation of the facts.”
That should be rich. Even richer in fact, in light of today’s newly released audio recordings in which the former president calls the January 6th mob a “very loving crowd.” With Trump in the background, it’s a safe bet that somehow, the focus of this GOP charade will shift to whatever Pelosi did or didn’t do before and during the attack, rather than Trump.
The question isn’t why the Speaker rejected two Republican nominees who plausibly share some blame for the insurrection itself. The questions are, by undermining an investigation at all, who are the Republicans trying to protect, and what are they trying to hide?
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For almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks, a political columnist for The Denver Post, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe. He won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Some of his essays also are published— with images— on a website he co-founded, BoomerCafe.com.
You nailed it! Great article! This needs to be in every newspaper across the country.
So very true Greg!