CASE STUDY: Trumpology (76) - Behind the scenes of the Capitol Invasion

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«When asked why they are bothering to investigate an event that most Americans have either misinterpreted or moved on from, members of Congress’s January 6th 2021 committee often cite history. “In five or ten years, when kids are in school,” said Adam Kinzinger, one of the two Republican members of the inquiry into the insurrection, “they are going to learn about [our] report, they’re not going to learn about the conspiracies.” A public hearing by the committee on June 9th gave a good indication of the record that the House committee intends, after 11 months of investigation, to lay down.

Liz Cheney, the committee’s other Republican, summed it up: “President Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob and lit the flame of this attack.” And he and his cronies did so, the committee has concluded, in the clear knowledge that Mr Trump had lost the election he claimed to have won.

Jason Miller, one of the former president’s senior advisers, told the committee that in the run-up to his re-election bid Mr Trump was told by his own campaign staff that he would lose. After that defeat duly transpired Mr Trump’s attorney-general, William Barr, informed him that his claim to be the victim of electoral fraud was “bullshit” and “nonsense”. Snippets of interviews given to the committee by both men were played in the public hearing—as was footage of an interview given by a tense-looking Ivanka Trump, in which she acknowledged that she had straightforwardly accepted Mr Barr’s view.

Why, if the fact that the president was lying was accepted within the administration, did almost none of its members speak out? Another snippet of testimony, from Jared Kushner, offered a clue. In response to questioning from Ms Cheney, Mr Kushner, the president’s consigliere and, as Ms Trump’s husband, his son-in-law, said that he had indeed been aware that the team of the White House counsel was threatening to quit over Mr Trump’s allegations, but that he considered such threats to be “whining”. This was an administration without basic principle.

It was immediately clear that Mr Trump’s lies inspired the Capitol riot, which claimed up to nine lives either on the day or subsequently from injuries and police suicides. The former president had invited the mob to a rally in Washington, dc; and there instructed them to go to the Capitol and “fight like hell”. When asked later why they were inside the building, many of the insurrectionists explained that Mr Trump had sent them. Yet the committee appears to have concluded that Mr Trump was even more complicit in the violence than that would suggest.

If he did not plan it he encouraged it, the hearing suggested. Mr Trump had pandered to the Proud Boys and Oath-Keepers, the far-right militia groups that led the assault. A member of the Proud Boys told the committee that its recruitment increased threefold after Mr Trump, before the election, had instructed its members to “stand by”. And senior figures in Trumpworld appear to have been forewarned of the militamen’s violent intent. “All hell will break loose tomorrow,” Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former chief strategist, told his podcast listeners on January 5th.

When it did, Mr Trump sat back and watched it happen. “Not only did President Trump refuse to tell the mob to leave the Capitol, he placed no call to any element of the US government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” said Ms Cheney, in a powerful opening speech. “He did not call his secretary of defence on January 6th. He did not talk to his attorney-general. He did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security. President Trump gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day, and he made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to co-ordinate and deploy law-enforcement assets.”

Mr Trump’s vice-president, Mike Pence, did do those things, Ms Cheney added—even as the mob was threatening to hang him for standing against Mr Trump’s attempted heist. When Mr Trump, watching the riot on television, was informed of that, he allegedly responded: “Maybe our supporters have the right idea.” Mike Pence “deserves” it.

As was typical for the hearing, that added a compelling detail to the contemporaneous reporting of the riot without revising it. Much the same was true of the hearing’s treatment of the insurrection itself. It offered no significant new analysis of January 6th. Yet it powerfully recreated that day’s horrors in the form of new video footage and live testimony from two people caught up in the riot: a British documentary film-maker called Nick Quested, and Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Hill police officer who was knocked senseless by the mob. “It was a war scene,” she said.»

Extract from Congress’s Capitol-riot hearing confirms Donald Trump’s complicity