[ The House report describes both a catastrophe and a way forward.
For the first time in the history of the United States, Congress
referred a former President to the Department of Justice for criminal
prosecution.]
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THE DEVASTATING NEW HISTORY OF THE JANUARY 6TH INSURRECTION (LONG)  
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David Remnick
December 22, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ The House report describes both a catastrophe and a way forward.
For the first time in the history of the United States, Congress
referred a former President to the Department of Justice for criminal
prosecution. _

Photograph by Balazs Gardi for The New Yorker,

 

_The New Yorker is publishing the full report of the House Select
Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, in partnership with
Celadon Books. The edition contains a foreword by the magazine’s
editor, David Remnick, which you’ll find below, and an epilogue by
Representative Jamie Raskin, a member of the committee. Order the
full report
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In the weeks while the House select committee to investigate the
insurrection at the Capitol was finishing its report, Donald Trump,
the focus of its inquiry, betrayed no sense of alarm or
self-awareness. At his country-club exile in Palm Beach, Trump ignored
the failures of his favored candidates in the midterm elections and
announced that he was running again for President. He dined cheerfully
and unapologetically with a spiralling Kanye West and a young
neo-fascist named Nick Fuentes. He mocked the government’s
insistence that he turn over all the classified documents that he’d
hoarded as personal property. Finally, he declared that he had a
“major announcement,” only to unveil the latest in a lifetime of
grifts. In the old days, it was Trump University, Trump Steaks, Trump
Ice. This time, he was hawking “limited edition” digital trading
cards at ninety-nine dollars apiece, illustrated portraits of himself
as an astronaut, a sheriff, a superhero. The pitch began with the
usual hokum: “Hello everyone, this is Donald Trump, hopefully your
favorite President of all time, better than Lincoln, better than
Washington.”

In his career as a New York real-estate shyster and tabloid denizen,
then as the forty-fifth President of the United States, Trump has been
the most transparent of public figures. He does little to conceal his
most distinctive characteristics: his racism, misogyny, dishonesty,
narcissism, incompetence, cruelty, instability, and corruption. And
yet what has kept Trump afloat for so long, what has helped him evade
ruin and prosecution, is perhaps his most salient quality: he is
shameless. That is the never-apologize-never-explain core of him.
Trump is hardly the first dishonest President, the first incurious
President, the first liar. But he is the most shameless. His
contrition is impossible to conceive. He is insensible to disgrace.

On December 19, 2022, the committee spelled out a devastating set of
accusations against Trump: obstruction of an official proceeding;
conspiracy to defraud the nation; conspiracy to make false statements;
and, most grave of all, inciting, assisting, aiding, or comforting an
insurrection. For the first time in the history of the United States,
Congress referred a former President to the Department of Justice for
criminal prosecution. The criminal referrals have no formal authority,
though they could play some role in pushing Jack Smith, the special
counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland, to issue
indictments. The report certainly adds immeasurably to the wealth of
evidence describing Trump’s actions and intentions. One telling
example: The committee learned that Hope Hicks, the epitome of a loyal
adviser, told Trump more than once in the days leading up to the
protest to urge the demonstrators to keep things peaceful. “I
suggested it several times Monday and Tuesday and he refused,” she
wrote in a text to another adviser. When Hicks questioned Trump’s
behavior concerning the insurrection and the consequences for his
legacy, he made his priorities clear: “Nobody will care about my
legacy if I lose. So, that won’t matter. The only thing that matters
is winning.”

Order the full report as a paperback, e-book, or audiobook
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Trump has been similarly dismissive of the committee’s work, going
on the radio to tell Dan Bongino, the host of “The Dan Bongino
Show,” that he had been the victim of a “kangaroo court.” On
Truth Social, his social-media platform, he appealed to the loyalty of
his supporters: “Republicans and Patriots all over the land must
stand strong and united against the Thugs and Scoundrels of the
Unselect Committee…. These folks don’t get it that when they come
after me, the people who love freedom rally around me. It strengthens
me. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.”

Experience makes it plain that Trump will just keep going on like
this, deflecting, denying, lashing out at his accusers, even if it
means that he will end his days howling in a bare and echoing room. It
matters little that the report shows that even members of his
innermost circle, from his Attorney General to his daughter, know the
depths of his vainglorious delusions. He will not repent. He will not
change. But the importance of the committee’s report has far less to
do with the spectacle of Trump’s unravelling. Its importance resides
in the establishment of a historical record, the depth of its
evidence, the story it tells of a deliberate, coördinated assault on
American democracy that could easily have ended with the kidnapping or
assassination of senior elected officials, the emboldenment of
extremist groups and militias, and, above all, a stolen election, a
coup.

The committee was not alone in its investigation. Many journalists
contributed to the steady accretion of facts. But, with the power of
subpoena, the committee was able to uncover countless new illuminating
details. One example: In mid-December, 2020, the Supreme Court threw
out a lawsuit filed by the State of Texas that would have challenged
the counting of millions of ballots. Trump, of course, supported the
suit. He was furious when it, like dozens of similar suits, was
dismissed. According to Cassidy Hutchinson, who worked directly for
Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, Trump was “raging”
about the decision: “He had said something to the effect of, ‘I
don’t want people to know we lost, Mark. This is embarrassing.
Figure it out. We need to figure it out. I don’t want people to know
that we lost.’”

In large measure, this report is the story of how Trump, humiliated by
his loss to Joe Biden, conspired to obstruct Congress, defraud the
country he was pledged to serve, and incite an insurrection to keep
himself in power.

The origins of the committee and its work are plain: On January 6,
2021, thousands marched on the Capitol in support of Trump and his
conspiratorial and wholly fabricated charge that the Presidential
election the previous November had been stolen from him. Demonstrators
breached police barricades, broke through windows and doors, and ran
through the halls of Congress threatening to exact vengeance on the
Vice-President, the Speaker of the House, and other officeholders.
Seven people died as a result of the insurrection. About a hundred and
fourteen law-enforcement officers were injured.

Half a year later, the House of Representatives voted to establish a
panel charged with investigating every aspect of the
insurrection—including the role of the former President. An earlier
attempt in the Senate to convene an investigative panel had met with
firm resistance from the Minority Leader, Mitch McConnell, who called
it an “extraneous” project; despite support from six Republican
senators, it failed to get the sixty votes required. It was left to
the Democratic leadership in the House to form a committee. The vote,
held on June 30, 2021, was largely along party lines, but the U.S.
House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the
United States Capitol officially came into existence.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

A REPORTER’S VIDEO FROM INSIDE THE CAPITOL SIEGE
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Click here to watch
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi then asked the Republicans to name G.O.P. members
to join the panel. The House Minority Leader, Kevin McCarthy,
responded by proposing some of the most prominent election deniers in
his caucus, including Jim Jordan, of Ohio, who had attended “Stop
the Steal” demonstrations and was sure to behave as an ardent
obstructionist. Pelosi, who had named Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, to the
panel, rejected two of McCarthy’s five recommendations, saying,
“The unprecedented nature of January 6th demands this unprecedented
decision.” After conferring with Trump, McCarthy refused to provide
alternatives, and abruptly withdrew all of his proposals, gambling
that doing so would derail or discredit the initiative. Pelosi, in
turn, asked a second Republican who had, with Cheney, voted to impeach
the President on a vote held on January 13th—Adam Kinzinger, of
Illinois—to serve on the committee. Both Cheney and Kinzinger
accepted.

Cheney, a firm conservative and the daughter of former Vice-President
Dick Cheney, had made her judgment of Trump well known. “The
President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob,
and lit the flame of this attack,” she said not long after the
insurrection. “Everything that followed was his doing.” She knew
that by opposing Trump and joining Kinzinger and the Democrats on the
committee she was almost sure to lose her seat in Congress. She
didn’t care, she said later, declaring her work on the panel, on
which she served as vice-chair, the “most important” of her
career. The G.O.P. leadership was unimpressed with this declaration of
principle. In February, 2022, the Republican National Committee
censured both Cheney and Kinzinger.

In deciding how to proceed with its investigation, the committee’s
chairman, Bennie G. Thompson, of Mississippi, along with Liz Cheney
and the seven other members, looked to a range of similarly
high-profile investigative panels of the past, including the so-called
Kefauver Committee, which investigated organized crime, in 1950-51;
the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F.
Kennedy, known as the Warren Commission, in 1963-64; the Senate
Watergate hearings, in 1973; the Iran-Contra hearings, in 1987; and,
particularly, the 9/11 Commission, in 2002-04. The committee hired
staff investigators who had worked in the Department of Justice and in
law enforcement, and they conducted more than a thousand interviews.
Teams were color-coded and tasked with making “deep dives” into
various aspects of January 6th. The division of labor included a
“blue team,” which examined the preparation for and the reaction
to events by law enforcement; a “green team,” which examined the
financial backing for the plot; a “purple team,” which conducted
an analysis of the extremist groups involved in the storming of the
Capitol; a “red team,” which studied the rally on the Ellipse and
the Stop the Steal movement; and a “gold team,” which looked
specifically at Trump’s role in the insurrection.

Committee members also insisted on inquiring into whether Trump
planned to use emergency powers to overturn the vote, call out the
National Guard, and invoke the Insurrection Act. Was Trump’s
inaction during the rioting on Capitol Hill merely a matter of
miserable leadership, or was it a deliberate strategy of fomenting
chaos in order to stay in the White House? “That dereliction of duty
causes us real concern,” Thompson said. In this way, an inquiry into
a specific episode broadened to encompass a topic of still greater
significance: Had the President sought to undermine and circumvent the
American system of electoral democracy?

The political urgency of the committee’s work was geared to the
calendar. Members had initially hoped to complete and publish a report
before the 2022 midterm elections. But that proved impossible, such
was the volume of evidence. Still, the committee members knew they
could not go on indefinitely. The Republicans were likely to win back
a majority in the House, in November, and McCarthy, who was the most
likely to succeed Nancy Pelosi as Speaker, would almost certainly
choose not to reauthorize the committee, effectively shutting it down;
it was also quite possible, they knew, that McCarthy and the
Republicans might generate “counter” hearings as an act of
retribution.

As the committee began its work, it was soon clear that the Republican
leadership in the House had made a tactical error in refusing to
appoint any members to the panel. Even Republicans less vociferous
than Jordan would have had the power to slow down the investigations,
debate points with Democratic members, and appoint less aggressive
staff members. Instead, the committee, with its seven Democrats and
two anti-Trump Republicans, worked in relative harmony, taking full
advantage of a sense of common purpose and the capacities of a
congressional committee.

Still, they faced predictable obstacles. Not only did many Trump
loyalists refuse to testify; much of the American public was, after so
many previous investigations, impeachments, scandals, and news alerts,
weary of hearing about the unending saga of Donald Trump. Who would
pay attention? What more was there to learn? In a polarized America,
who was left to be persuaded? Committee members such as Jamie Raskin,
of Maryland, insisted that the real purpose of the investigation was
to establish the truth. What prosecutors and the electorate make of
those facts is beyond the committee’s authority.

The committee members determined that they could not go about the
hearings in the old way, with day after day of interminable
questioning of witnesses. Instead, they needed to produce discrete,
well-produced, briskly paced multimedia “episodes” designed to
highlight various aspects of the insurrection: its origins, its
funding, the behavior of the President, the level of involvement by
white nationalists, militias, and other menacing groups. The members
agreed that, in an age of peak TV, they needed to present a kind of
series, one that was dramatic, accessible, accurate, evidence-rich,
and convincing. Ideally, they would provide a narrative that did not
merely preach to the converted but reached the millions of Americans
who were indifferent to or confused by the unending stream of noise,
indirection, hysteria, lying, and chaos that had characterized the
hyperpolarized era. The committee also recognized that only a minority
would watch the full hearings, much less read every word of a long
narrative report months later. They needed to produce the hearings in
a way that could also be transmitted effectively in bits on social
media and go viral. They needed memorable moments and characters. In
the words of one staffer, “We needed to bring things to life.”

To help with that effort, the committee hired an adviser, the
British-born television producer James Goldston, who had been a
foreign correspondent for the BBC in Northern Ireland and Kosovo.
Goldston had also covered the impeachment of Bill Clinton. In 2004, he
moved to New York and went to work at ABC, where he ran “Good
Morning America” and “Nightline”; between 2014 and 2021, he
served as president of ABC News. The committee decided to videotape
its depositions, and Goldston was among those who helped to select
brief and particularly vivid moments from those long interviews, the
way a journalist uses quotations or scenes to enliven a piece of
narrative prose. The committee’s presentations also employed
everything from surveillance video to police radio traffic to the
e-mails and tweets of government officials, right-wing media
personalities, militia leaders, and the insurrectionists on Capitol
Hill.

“We live in an era where, no matter how important the subject,
it’s competing for attention,” Goldston told a reporter for
TheWrap. “People are distracted, people have got a lot going on. And
so, the hope was, by bringing these new techniques to this format,
that we could engage people in a way that perhaps they wouldn’t
otherwise have been.” The second prime-time hearing brought in
nearly eighteen million viewers, an audience comparable to NBC’s
“Sunday Night Football.” The Republican House leadership was
predictably unimpressed with the committee’s commitment to
narrative, prompting Kevin McCarthy to say that the Democrats had
hired Goldston to “choreograph their Jan. 6 political theater.”

The committee’s published report does not have a single authorial
voice. Rather, it is a collaborative effort written mainly by a team
of investigators and staffers, with input from members of the
committee. And, while it lacks a mediating, consistent voice, it is a
startlingly rich narrative, thick with details of malevolent intent,
political conspiracy, sickening violence, and human folly. There is no
question that historians will feast on these pages; what the
Department of Justice does with this evidence remains to be seen.

At times, there’s comedy embedded in this tragic narrative. A figure
such as Eric Herschmann, a Trump adviser, holds the stage long enough
to recount telling the Trump lawyer John Eastman that his plan to
overturn the election is “completely crazy”: “Are you out of
your effing mind?” And: “Get a great effing criminal defense
lawyer. You’re gonna need it.” Viewers of Herschmann’s
deliciously profane taped testimony were transfixed by at least two
artifacts on the wall behind him: a baseball bat with the word
“Justice” written on it and a print of “Wild Thing,” Rob
Pruitt’s image of a panda, which also makes an appearance in the
erotic thriller “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

Anyone who watched the hearings and who now reads this report will
dwell at times on the outsized figures who emerge, either in their own
testimony or as described by others: the neo-fascistic campaign
strategist and onetime White House aide Steve Bannon; the blandly
ambitious Mark Meadows, the chief of staff in the final year of the
Trump Administration; and, of course, the oft-inebriated Rudy
Giuliani, the onetime New York City mayor and Trump’s personal
lawyer.

Time and again, senior figures in the drama refused to testify, hiding
behind claims of executive privilege. The report includes many comical
instances of would-be witnesses claiming their Fifth Amendment rights
and refusing to answer questions as benign as where they went to
college. And so it was often the junior staffers in the
Administration, with far less to spend on legal fees and with their
futures at risk, who stepped forward to describe what they had seen
and heard. The most memorable such episode came on June 28th, when
Cassidy Hutchinson, the earnest young aide to Meadows, testified live
before the committee. Hutchinson had already been deposed four times,
for a total of more than twenty hours. Liz Cheney, as the vice-chair,
began the session by announcing that Hutchinson had received an
ominous phone call from someone in Trump’s circle saying, “He
wants me to let you know he’s thinking about you. He knows you’re
loyal. And you’re going to do the right thing when you go in for
your deposition.” Cheney bluntly referred to this as tantamount to
witness tampering. When the report and its accompanying materials were
finally released, we learned that Hutchinson told the committee that a
former Trump White House lawyer named Stefan Passantino, who
represented her early in the process, had instructed her to feign a
faulty memory and “focus on protecting the President.” She said
Passantino made it plain that he would help find her “a really good
job in Trump world” so long as she protected “the family.”
Hutchinson also testified that an aide to Meadows, Ben Williamson, had
passed along a message from Meadows that he “knows that you’ll do
the right thing tomorrow and that you’re going to protect him and
the boss.”

But Hutchinson, who had been a loyal staffer in the Trump White House,
privy to countless conversations in and around the offices of the
President and the chief of staff, would not be intimidated. She found
new counsel and thwarted the thuggish attempts to gain her silence,
delivering some of the most damning testimony of the investigation.
She described conversations, some secondhand, that made it plain that
Trump knew full well that he had lost the election but would stop at
nothing to keep power. Because of her preternatural calm before the
microphone, the uninflected, more-in-sadness-than-in-anger tone of her
delivery, Hutchinson was often compared to John Dean, the White House
counsel under Richard Nixon, who emerged from the Watergate hearings
as the most memorable and decisive witness.

But the nature of Hutchinson’s testimony, in keeping with the era,
was distinctly more lurid than Dean’s. She recalled how Trump hurled
his lunch against the wall, splattering ketchup everywhere, when he
learned that Attorney General William Barr had publicly declared that
there was, in fact, no evidence of election fraud. On other occasions,
she said, the President pulled out “the tablecloth to let all the
contents of the table go onto the floor and likely break or go
everywhere.” She recounted the names of the many
Trumpists—including Meadows, Giuliani, Matt Gaetz, and Louie
Gohmert—who had requested that Trump grant them pardons in
connection with the Capitol attack. She said that, three days before
the insurrection, the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone, told Trump
that, if he carried out his plan to march to the Capitol with the
crowds, “we’re going to get charged with every crime
imaginable.” Hutchinson testified that on January 6th Cipollone told
Meadows, “They’re literally calling for the Vice President to be
effing hung.” As she recalled, “Mark had responded something to
the effect of ‘You heard him, Pat. He thinks Mike deserves it. He
doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong.’ ”

Finally, Hutchinson made it clear just how much Trump had wanted to
join the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill. Trump was so incensed with
his Secret Service detail for refusing to take him there, she
testified, that he lunged at the agent driving his car and struggled
for the wheel. The report corroborates Hutchinson’s testimony,
saying that the “vast majority” of its law-enforcement sources
described a “furious interaction” between the President and his
security contingent in his S.U.V. The sources said that Trump was
“furious,” “insistent,” “profane,” and “heated.” The
committee concluded that Trump had hoped to lead the effort to
overturn the election either from inside the House chamber or from a
stage outside the building.

Hutchinson was equally forthright about Trump’s disregard for public
safety. Despite being told that many of the supporters who came out to
see him speak on January 6th were armed, she said, Trump insisted that
the Secret Service remove the “mags”—the metal detectors. He was
not terribly concerned that someone might be killed or injured, so
long as it wasn’t him. “I don’t fucking care that they have
weapons,” he said, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to
hurt me.”

The insurrection at the Capitol was of such grave consequence for
liberal democracy and the rule of law that commentators have struggled
ever since to find some historical precedent to provide context and
understanding to a nation in a state of continuing crisis. 

Some thought immediately of the sack of the Capitol, in 1814, though
the perpetrators then were foreign, soldiers of the British crown.
Others have pointed to contested Presidential elections of the
past—1824, 1876, 1960, 2000—but those ballots were certified,
peacefully and lawfully, by Congress. None of the losers sought to
foment an uprising or create a national insurgency. Compare Trump’s
self-absorption and rage with Al Gore’s graceful acceptance of the
Supreme Court’s decision handing the election to George W. Bush:
“Tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of
our democracy, I offer my concession.”

Still, there have been efforts to overturn the constitutional order,
notably in the “secession winter” of 1860-61, when seven
slaveholding states, having warned that they would never accept the
election of Abraham Lincoln, declared themselves in opposition to the
United States itself. As Lincoln prepared for his inauguration, to be
held in March, he received a series of warnings that an army raised in
Virginia might invade Washington, D.C. So prevalent were the rumors of
a Confederate conspiracy that Congress assembled a committee to
“inquire whether a secret organization hostile to the government of
the United States exists in the District of Columbia.” Lincoln was
particularly concerned about a potential plot to undermine the
counting of electors, an event scheduled for February. In the end,
John Breckinridge, James Buchanan’s Vice-President and a loser in
the 1860 Presidential race, obeyed the law. Although Breckinridge was
sympathetic to the secessionist cause, he presided with “Roman
fidelity” at the certification vote, according to Representative
Henry Dawes, of Massachusetts, “and the nation was saved.” But
only temporarily. On April 12, 1861, the South Carolina militia opened
fire on the Union garrison at Fort Sumter and the Civil War began.

A civil war, in the nineteenth-century understanding of the term, is
not at hand. But what makes the events of January 6, 2021, so alarming
is that they were inspired and incited by the President of the United
States, Donald Trump, who remains popular among so many Republicans
and a contender to return to the White House.

The events of January 6th were the culmination of a long campaign that
Trump and members of his circle have led against the legitimacy of
American elections. The campaign’s most powerful weapon was the
undermining of truth itself, the insidious deployment of conspiracy
theories and “alternative facts.”

Trump first announced his emergence from the worlds of New York real
estate and reality-show television by declaring that Barack Obama, the
first Black President, had been born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and was,
therefore, ineligible to hold office. After joining the 2016
Presidential race, Trump continued to traffic in casual accusations
and unfounded conspiracy theories: Ted Cruz’s father was an
associate of Lee Harvey Oswald. Antonin Scalia might have been
murdered. Obama and Joe Biden might have staged the killing of Osama
bin Laden with a body double. Trump welcomed the endorsement of the
professional conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who had earlier claimed
that Hillary Clinton had “personally murdered and chopped up and
raped” children, and that the mass murder at Sandy Hook had been
“staged.” The most consequential conspiracy theory of Trump’s
political career, however, charged that American elections were
rigged.

In 2016, Trump, once he had a hold on the Republican Party nomination,
began the process of undermining confidence in the entire electoral
system. The reporter Jonathan Lemire, in his book, “The Big Lie,”
recalls attending a rally, in Columbus, Ohio, at which Trump told his
followers, weeks before the nominating Convention, “I’m afraid the
election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest.” On Fox News,
talking with Sean Hannity, Trump again expressed his doubts: “I hope
the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away
from us.” Trump began to warn that he was not necessarily prepared
to accede to the election results. At one of the Presidential debates,
the moderator, Chris Wallace, asked Trump if he would make a
commitment to accept the outcome, no matter what. Trump refused: “I
will look at it at the time. What I’ve seen is so bad.”

Clinton won the popular vote by a margin of more than two per cent,
but, because she fell well short in the Electoral College, there was
no compulsion on Trump’s part to consider extralegal action. But
four years later, as Trump lagged behind Joe Biden in the polls, he
revived the theme. “MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY
FOREIGN COUNTRIES, AND OTHERS,” he tweeted. “IT WILL BE THE
SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!” Once more, Trump refused to promise a
peaceful transfer of power. A month and a half before the election, he
said, “Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very
peaceful—there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a
continuation.”

This kind of rhetoric was of grave concern to Democrats, including
Speaker Pelosi, who privately told confidants, “He’s going to try
to steal it.” And, not long after the voting ended, the tweets from
Trump began:

Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost
all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they
started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted.
VERY STRANGE, and the pollsters got it completely & historically
wrong!

They are finding Biden votes all over the place—in Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, and Michigan. So bad for our Country!

On November 7th, the Associated Press, Fox News, and, soon, all the
other major news outlets called Pennsylvania, and the election, for
Biden. The battleground states—Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia,
Arizona, and Wisconsin—all went Biden’s way, and, in the end, he
won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. In his victory speech, the
President-elect said, “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric.
To lower the temperature.”

This was a vain hope. As the Trump White House emptied, a motley
assemblage of satraps and third-raters—Giuliani; a former federal
prosecutor, Sidney Powell; the MyPillow C.E.O., Mike Lindell; the
former law professor and Federalist Society leader John
Eastman—stayed behind to encourage Trump in his most conspiratorial
fantasies and schemes. In their effort to challenge election results
in various states, Trump’s lawyers filed sixty-two federal and state
lawsuits. They lost sixty-one of those suits, winning only on an
inconsequential technical matter in Pennsylvania. By mid-December,
even Mitch McConnell began referring to “President-elect Joe
Biden.” When Trump called to berate him for conceding the ballot,
McConnell, for once, stood up to him. “The Electoral College has
spoken,” he said. “You lost the election.”

The only option Trump had left was to challenge the certification of
the vote. With Eastman in the lead, his team concocted a plan that
called on Vice-President Pence to declare that voting in seven states
was still in dispute and to eliminate those electors. If the remaining
forty-three states put forward their electors, Trump would win the
election, 232–222. As part of that plan—what Chairman Thompson
called, from the first day of the hearings, “an attempted
coup”—Trump pressured government and election officials to
coöperate. Former Deputy Attorney General Richard Donoghue testified
that Trump did not conceal his intent, telling Donoghue, “What I’m
asking you to do is just say it was corrupt and leave the rest to me
and the Republican congressmen.” Once Trump unleashed his campaign
of intimidation against local election officials, the death threats
against those officials came from all directions. Ruby Freeman, an
election worker in Georgia, testified, “There is nowhere I feel
safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the President of the
United States target you?”

Another version of the plan had Pence calling for a ten-day-long
recess and sending the slates back to the so-called “disputed”
states. Eastman himself conceded that this plan would be rejected
unanimously by the Supreme Court. Even so, the White House could
surely be retained if Trump could convince Pence to “do the right
thing.”

On the night of January 5th, the President met with Pence at the White
House and tried to pressure him into adopting the scheme that Eastman
had devised. For years, Pence had been the most loyal of deputies,
never daring to challenge the falsehoods or the cruelties of his
master. Trump, after all, had rescued him from political oblivion. But
Pence would not go along with the plot. His job on January 6th, he
told the President, was ceremonial. He was only there “to open
envelopes.”

Trump was outraged. “You’ve betrayed us,” he told Pence. “I
made you. You were nothing.”

The committee’s report is not a work of scholarship removed from its
era. It was compiled by politicians and staff members and published at
a moment of continuing peril and uncertainty. And the committee was
formed in the contrails of the terrifying episode it was charged with
investigating.

Although an abundance of new details has surfaced, the contours of
what happened have never been in doubt. The events on January 6, 2021,
began with a well-planned rally on the Ellipse, the fifty-two-acre
park south of the White House. Trump had tweeted in advance, “Be
there, will be wild!” Katrina Pierson, a spokeswoman for Trump’s
2016 campaign and one of the organizers of the rally, had texted
another organizer saying that Trump “likes the crazies,” and
wanted Alex Jones to be among the speakers. Jones did not speak, but
Trump himself supplied the inflammatory rhetoric. In the
seventy-minute-long speech he gave on the Ellipse, he told his
followers they would “save our democracy” by rejecting “a fake
election,” and warned them that “if you don’t fight like hell,
you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He taunted his
Vice-President: “Mike Pence, I hope you're going to stand up for the
good of our Constitution and for the good of our country. And if
you’re not, I’m going to be very disappointed in you.” He set a
tone of combativeness, defiance, and eternal resistance. And he put
the life of his own Vice-President in jeopardy. As Chairman Thompson
put it at one hearing, “Donald Trump turned the mob on him.”

Even though senior officials around Trump had told him that it was
long past time to step aside—William Barr informed congressional
investigators that he told Trump that reports of voting fraud were
“bullshit”—Trump refused to listen. (“I thought, boy, if he
really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with,
he’s become detached from reality,” Barr recalled.) Trump was
unrelenting. “We will never give up,” he told the crowd on the
Ellipse. “We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t
concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We
will not take it anymore.” After listening to the President’s
repeated calls to fight, and to march to the Capitol
building—“you’ll never take back our country with
weakness”—thousands of his followers, some of them armed, some of
them carrying Confederate symbols, some deploying flagpoles as spears,
headed toward Capitol Hill.

As the march began, at around 1 _p.m._, Representative Paul Gosar, of
Arizona, and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, both conservative
Republicans, rose in Congress to object to the counting of the
electoral ballots from Arizona. But Pence had already told Trump he
would not go along with his plot, and there was no sign that Gosar,
Cruz, and Trump’s loyalists in Congress had the numbers to succeed.
McConnell, at that time the Senate Majority Leader, said, “Voters,
the courts, and the states have all spoken—they’ve all spoken. If
we overrule them all, it would damage our republic forever.”

By 2 _p.m._, demonstrators began to overrun the Capitol Police,
sometimes using improvised weapons. Caroline Edwards, of the Capitol
Police, testified to the committee that there was “carnage” in the
halls: “I was slipping in people’s blood.” The insurrectionists
kept coming, breaking through windows and doors, assaulting police
officers, and, once inside, they went hunting for the Vice-President,
the Speaker of the House, and other officials who refused to
participate in the President’s scheme to overturn the election. At
around 2:20 _p.m._, the Senate, and then the House, went into
emergency recess, as Capitol Police officers rushed members of both
chambers to safety. The two Democratic congressional leaders, Nancy
Pelosi and Charles Schumer, fearing for their lives and the lives of
their colleagues, were reduced to sequestering in a safe location. In
the final session of the committee’s investigation, we saw footage
of Pelosi, enraged yet composed, deploying her cell phone to get
someone to come to the aid of the legislative branch.

Trump watched these events on television at the White House with scant
sense of alarm. He refused to send additional police or troops to
quell the violence. At 2:24 _p.m._, he tweeted, “Mike Pence
didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect
our Country and our Constitution.” By 3 _p.m._, insurrectionists,
some of them in cosplay battle gear, had swarmed into the Senate
chamber. Trump’s passivity was not passivity at all. As Adam
Kinzinger put it, “President Trump did not fail to act. He chose not
to act.” Liz Cheney was no less blunt. “He refused to defend our
nation and our Constitution,” she said during the hearings. “I say
this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible,
there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. But your dishonor
will remain.”

For Trump, the choice was simple. The insurrectionists were his
people, his shock troops, there to do his bidding. Nothing about the
spectacle seemed to disturb him: not the gallows erected outside the
building, not the savage beatings, not threats to Pence and Pelosi,
not graffiti like “Murder the Media,” not the chants of “1776!
1776!” And so he ignored calls to action even from his own party. At
3:11 _p.m._, Mike Gallagher, a Republican from Wisconsin, tweeted,
“We are witnessing absolute banana republic crap in the United
States Capitol right now. @realdonaldtrump you need to call this
off.” Trump would not tell his supporters to go home until the early
evening, when the damage had been done.

And though Trump and the insurrectionists failed to halt the
certification of the ballot, they did get substantial support: a
hundred and forty-seven Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the
election results. At 3:42 _a.m._ on January 7th, Vice-President
Pence, speaking to a joint session of Congress, certified the election
of Joe Biden as the forty-sixth President of the United States. When,
however, the midterms were held, two years later, dozens of Republican
candidates continued to claim that his election was fraudulent. Those
few Republicans, like Liz Cheney, who took a stand against Trump were
swept out of office.

January 6th was a phenomenon rooted both in the degraded era of Trump
and in the radicalization of a major political party during the past
generation. The very power of these developments explains why many
people may approach this congressional report with a sense of fatigue,
even denial. Part of Trump’s dark achievement has been to bludgeon
the political attention of the country into submission.

When a nation has been subjected to that degree of cynicism—what is
politely called “divisiveness”—it can lose its ability to
experience outrage. As a result, the prospect of engaging with this
congressional inquiry into Trump’s attempt to delegitimatize the
machinery of electoral democracy is sometimes a challenge to the
spirit. That is both understandable and a public danger. And yet a
citizenry that can no longer bring itself to pay attention to such an
investigation or to absorb its astonishing findings risks moving even
farther toward a disturbing “new normal”: a post-truth,
post-democratic America.

A republic is predicated on faith—not religious faith but a faith in
the fundamental legitimacy of its political institutions and the
decisions they issue. To concede the legitimacy of statutes, rulings,
and election returns is not necessarily to favor them. It’s simply
to participate in the basic system that gives them form and force;
citizens can, through democratic machinery, seek to defeat or contest
candidates they deplore, initiatives that offend them, court opinions
they consider misguided. By contrast, the campaign that culminated in
the Capitol attack of January 6th was, fatefully, against democracy
itself. It sought to instill profound mistrust in the process of
voting—the mechanism through which, even in highly imperfect
democracies, accountability is ultimately secured.

The committee and its work were far from apolitical, and yet to
dismiss the report as _merely_ political would be a perilous act of
resignation and defeatism. The questions that hovered over the inquiry
from the start—what more is there to learn? who is really
listening?—persisted and loomed over the midterm elections. When the
hearings began, the polling outfit FiveThirtyEight reported that
Trump’s approval rating was 41.9 per cent; when the hearings ended,
it was 40.4 per cent, a minuscule dip. As Susan B. Glasser, of _The
New Yorker_, wrote, “All that damning evidence, and the polls were
basically unchanged. The straight line in the former President’s
approval rating is the literal representation of the crisis in
American democracy. There is an essentially immovable forty per cent
of the country whose loyalty to Donald Trump cannot be shaken by
anything.” And yet the Republicans failed in their promise to
produce a “red wave” in the midterms. The Democrats maintained
their slender hold on the Senate and lost far fewer seats in the House
than was expected. And while the reasons behind the Republican failure
were many, ranging from the imperilment of abortion rights to the
dismal quality of so many of the Party’s candidates, it was clear
that one of the principal reasons was a deep concern about the future
of democracy.

The most urgent thing to learn is whether a two-and-a-half-century-old
republic will resist future efforts to undercut its foundations—to
steal, through concerted deception, the essential legitimacy of its
constitutional order. The contents of the report insist that
complacency is not an option. The report also insists on
accountability, though that will ultimately be the responsibility of
the Department of Justice and the American public. The report has
provided the evidence, the truth. Now it remains to be seen if it will
be acted upon.

The violation of January 6th was ultimately so brazen that many of
Trump’s own loyalists could not, in the end, bring themselves to
defend him. Even some on the radical right have come to recognize the
insurrection’s implications for the future. Jason van Tatenhove was
once the media spokesman for the militia group known as the Oath
Keepers, which played a crucial role in the uprising. He left the
group well before January 6th, but he remained well connected enough
to know that the Oath Keepers were eager to take part in an “armed
revolution.” Testifying before the committee, he expressed his sense
of betrayal by Donald Trump, and a growing sense of alarm: “If a
President that’s willing to try to instill and encourage, to whip
up, a civil war among his followers uses lies and deceit and snake
oil, regardless of the human impact, what else is he going to do?”

Trump is running again for President. Perhaps his decline is
irreversible. But it would be foolish to count on that. Should he win
back the White House, he will come to office with no sense of
restraint. He will inevitably be an even more radical, more resentful,
more chaotic, more authoritarian version of his earlier self. And he
would hardly be an isolated figure in the capital. Following the
results of the midterm elections, Congress is now populated with
dozens of election deniers and many more who still dare not defy
Trump. The stakes could not be higher. If you are reaching for
optimism—and despair is not an option—the existence and the depth
of the committee’s project represents a kind of hope. It represents
an insistence on truth and democratic principle. In the words of the
man who tried and failed to overturn a Presidential election, you
don’t concede when there’s theft involved

_[DAVID REMNICK
[[link removed]] has been
editor of The New Yorker since 1998 and a staff writer since 1992. He
is the author of “The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama
[[link removed]].”]_

More on the January 6th Attack

*
When the Capitol was breached, a _New Yorker_ reporter became the
sole journalist in the Senate chamber to witness its desecration
[[link removed]].

*
Inside the chamber, Luke Mogelson captured raw, visceral footage of
the siege
[[link removed]].

*
Should Americans refer to the Sixth of January as a protest, an act of
treason, or something else
[[link removed]]?

*
What the January 6th papers reveal
[[link removed]].

*
How a mother of eight became one of the riot’s biggest mysteries,
and a fugitive from the F.B.I.
[[link removed]]

*
The violence was what Donald Trump wanted
[[link removed]].

*
If America is to remain a democracy, Trump must be held accountable
[[link removed]].

* Jan. 06
[[link removed]]
* House Committee
[[link removed]]
* House Select Committee
[[link removed]]
* Capitol coup
[[link removed]]
* Insurrection
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* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* MAGA
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* GOP
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* Republican Party
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* Congress
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* transfer of power
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* criminal conspiracy
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* Fascism
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* 2020 elections
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* 2022 Elections
[[link removed]]
* 2024 Elections
[[link removed]]

*
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*
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*
*
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