What will be the outcome of the January 6th hearings?

The U.S. House Committee convened to investigate the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of “make America great again” (MAGA) supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, went out with a bang in October. It sent a subpoena to former President Trump, demanding that he testify to the committee about his role in the January 6 riot.

Of course, Trump won’t respect the subpoena to appear before the committee on November 14 or to provide it with documents. And if he even decides to challenge it in court, he knows that all he must do is to delay long enough for the Republicans to take charge of the House next January. Assuming that is the outcome of the November election, the first action the GOP House will take on assuming power will be to disband the January 6 committee.

Still, the subpoena, as written, is a summary of the case against Trump that the January 6 committee laid out in vivid detail over its set of public hearings held last summer. It’s close to a de facto criminal referral to the U.S. Justice Department, laying out the reasons for why Attorney General Merrick Garland should indict Trump on federal charges. The cover letter to the subpoena made this plain:

[W]e have assembled overwhelming evidence, including from dozens of your former appointees and staff, that you personally orchestrated and oversaw a multi-part effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election and to obstruct the peaceful transition of power . . . You took all of these actions despite the rulings of more than 60 courts rejecting your election fraud claims and other challenges to the legality of the 2020 presidential election, despite having specific and detailed information from the Justice Department and your senior campaign staff informing you that your election claims were false, and despite your obligation as President to ensure that the laws of our nation are faithfully executed. In short, you were at the center of the first and only effort by any U.S. President to overturn an election and obstruct the peaceful transition of power, ultimately culminating in a bloody attack on our own Capitol and on the Congress itself.

The committee’s attempt to get Trump on the record was at least a gesture of accountability for the intellectual and tactical author of the January 6 riot while the Justice Department is actively prosecuting almost 1,000 of his foot soldiers who carried out the sacking of the Capitol.

Using a well-crafted narrative and some media-savvy techniques, the January 6 committee revealed several facts that weren’t initially clear when the January 6 riot unfolded on live TV. And it unearthed enough gaps in the official story to raise further questions that should be investigated. Among these are:

Trump knew he lost the 2020 election, but he continued to propagate the Big Lie anyway. But the challenges to the election were only a part of a multi-pronged strategy to stop the congressional certification of Biden’s election, and to keep himself in power by hook or by crook.
Trump and his chief of staff Mark Meadows, and their allies, like dirty trickster Roger Stone, were much more central to planning the events on January 6 than thought previously.Even Ginny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, had a role in organizing and financing the pre-riot rally at which Trump spoke.
Far-right gangs, such as the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, not only tried to catapult themselves to the center of U.S. politics under an umbrella of protection that the broader “Stop the Steal” mobilization provided, they were much more crucial to the day’s events than initially appeared. Guilty pleas from Oath Keeper and Proud Boys leaders—and hundreds of hours of video evidence—have shown that the two groups had plans to organize an armed takeover of the Capitol. And that they had only an arms-distance from the White House.
Trump and interim appointees he put in charge of the Pentagon and other military forces deliberately held off deploying troops to protect the Capitol, even after it was clear the mob had breached the building and were threatening to execute the vice president and the speaker of the U.S. House. Not only was it very likely that many law enforcement personnel were sympathetic to the January 6 mob – as many on the left remarked at the time – but their commanders deliberately stood aside to let the mob advance. In the period where Trump was gleefully watching the mob sack the Capitol, Vice President Mike Pence and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were effectively running the government.
The supposedly nonpartisan Secret Service is infested with Trumpists, and its “dog ate my homework” excuse for deleting thousands of its agents’ text messages from January 5-6, 2021, only made it more difficult to shake the notion that it was functioning as a praetorian guard for Trump.Credible testimony from Pence’s most trusted staff suggested that Pence feared the Secret Service might whisk him away from the Capitol and prevent him from performing his role as presiding over the certification of Biden’s election.

Any one of these revelations would be shocking to the normally dull world of Washington politics, but all of them together paint a very damning portrait. Mark Danner’s must-read article in The New York Review of Books poses the counterfactual:

It is shockingly easy to imagine how the events of January 6, with just a tiny detail altered—a Secret Service agent, say, who was not quite so determined in opposing a screaming commander in chief—could have worked out quite differently and produced a reelected President Trump and furious Democrats marching in the streets. Would the triumphant president have called out the military to quell those crowds, as he had tried to do the previous spring during the Black Lives Matter protests? Would the senior officers—as “nonpolitical” as they pride themselves on being—have dared to disobey?

Did Trump envision himself as a Mussolini figure, leading a march of his supporters to the Capitol, to force the politicians holed up there to hand the government over to him? Trump’s presidency was, in most ways, shambolic. But the veteran (and utterly Establishment) journalist Bob Woodward, reflecting on hours of interviews with Trump conducted throughout his administration, warned that the interview tapes “[leave] no doubt that after four years in the presidency, Trump has learned where the levers of power are, and full control means installing absolute loyalists in key Cabinet and White House posts.The record now shows that Trump has led — and continues to lead — a seditious conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, which in effect is an effort to destroy democracy.”

It’s easy for Trump critics to point to the venal, twice-impeached ex-president as the root cause of this effort to “destroy democracy.” In fact, many liberals proceed from the assumption that “good” Republicans like Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger—the only two who joined the January 6 committee—will join with them in an anti-Trump “popular front”to “save American democracy.” This ignores the fact that the majority of House Republicans on January 6/7 voted to sustain completely fabricated objections to state election results, and that Republicans in the U.S. Senate refused to convict Trump when the House impeached him for his role in fomenting the January 6 riot.Moreover, Republican Party politicians and officials aided Trump’s January 6 scheme to present slates of pro-Trump electoral college electors to replace Biden electors, who represented the popular vote winner in those states.

With an anti-democratic spirit pervading the top ranks of the Republican Party, is it any wonder that almost two-thirds of GOP voters believe the Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump?Or that most of them think of January 6 as a “legitimate protest” rather than a “riot” or “insurrection”—and that those opinions have actually strengthened over the last year. This radicalized Republican “base,” living in the conservative media’s alternate universe, is the product of years of propaganda and organization that mainstream GOP institutions, from Fox News to the Republican Governors’ Association, have pursued and billionaires like the Koch network have funded. These elite actors know that the majority of Americans reject their views, and that goals they seek—from banning abortion nationwide to privatizing Social Security—are enormously unpopular. Accomplishing them means negating the democratic will of the majority, including, apparently, countenancing the idea of throwing out the votes of 81 million Americans in 2020.

The January 6 mob—disproportionately composed of small business owners, professionals, ex-military and law enforcement veterans—may have been the tip of the spear on that day. But they were operating within a “permission structure” the U.S.’s conservative elite created, and that Trump broke open. Even more concerning, millions of Americans supported their actions.

Major business organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), famously issued statements condemning the January 6 riot. “This is sedition and should be treated as such,” said NAM. A roster of major corporations pledged to deny campaign contributions to House members who voted to overturn Biden’s election. Predictably, those pledges weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Within months, major corporations and corporate lobbying groups had already reopened the spigots of corporate cash to election deniers.Maybe supporting a bit of “sedition” is a necessary evil for winning corporate subsidies or weakened environmental regulations?Republican Kari Lake, among the fringiest of election conspiracists with a good chance of being the next governor of Arizona, “has seen a wave of support from corporate leaders in her bid for office,” CNBC reported.

If, as is currently expected, the GOP wins the House or the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms, the Republican majority will claim that the “American people” rejected, or didn’t care about, the January 6 findings. It will move quickly to delegitimize them, and perhaps even to investigate the January 6 investigators themselves. Then, the onus to bring Trump and his co-conspirators to account will shift to the Biden administration’s Justice Department. In a climate where the Biden administration’s popularity will fall further as the Federal Reserve-engineered recession takes hold, will it show the political will to indict the likely 2024 Republican candidate for president?