History will look kindly on the Jan. 6 committee

Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., were honored by President Joe Biden with the Presidential Citizens Medal last week. It’s the second-highest civilian award in the U.S., and for the co-chairs of the House Jan. 6 committee it’s well-deserved.

In an interview with NBC News in December, though, President-elect Donald Trump promised to pardon Jan. 6 rioters and said, “Everybody on that committee … for what they did, yeah, honestly, they should go to jail.”

The committee may have lost the current political moment, but it did invaluable work to preserve a meticulous and comprehensive record of Trump’s monthslong attempt at a self-coup. As disgraceful as it is that Trump is going to avoid accountability — and is now empowered to spur bogus investigations into the committee’s members — history should look kindly on the Jan. 6 committee’s final report.

Trump’s return to the White House is, by all appearances, a rejection by the American people of the defunct committee’s work. Many Republicans and conservative commentators who four years ago said Trump’s incitement of the mob that attacked the Capitol rendered him unfit for office have since fallen in line behind the party’s unquestioned leader. And he’s unlikely to ever have to answer before a jury of his peers for his attempt to overturn a free and fair election based on lies that — as members of his own administration testified before the Jan. 6 committee — he knew were lies.

Though MAGA always positioned the bipartisan committee as a “witch hunt” and a “kangaroo court,” the committee’s hearings were both dramatic and sober. There was appalling video of the day’s violence, much of it never before shown to the public. And contrary to MAGA accusations of a Democratic partisan witch hunt, nearly all of the testimony came from former Trump administration officials, other Republicans and police officers savagely assaulted by Trump’s mob.

But despite the committee’s name, a lot of the testimony had little to do with the Jan. 6 riot itself. Trump’s repeated attempts to bully Republican state officials into overturning the election results were also exhaustively documented.

To cite just one of these officials, Arizona’s Republican House speaker, Rusty Bowers, testified that after refusing to submit to Trump’s demands, he endured a public smear campaign and faced harassment at his home. One man showed up to his residence and waved a gun at his family and neighbors. Bowers called Trump’s attempt to steal the election a “tragic parody.”

Trump’s attorney general at the time, Bill Barr, told the committee under oath that he informed Trump his accusations about voter fraud were “bullshit.” Trump’s daughter Ivanka, also under oath, echoed Barr’s assessment of her father’s big lie.

So, how has this already been so thoroughly memory-holed?

As I wrote last month, “Trump’s ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen has been debunked for years in court and by Republican and Democratic election officials. … But the ‘basic message’ of that lie will never die. In fact, you could say the big lie won the 2024 election.”

MAGA-friendly media figures have been working hard to soft-sell Jan. 6 as either a nothingburger or peddle the falsehood that it was a crime actually committed by Democrats and “the establishment.”

Around the time of last year’s Jan. 6 anniversary, Joe Rogan, Vivek Ramaswamy and other MAGA and “heterodox” influencers spread false innuendo that the Jan. 6 rioters were “entrapped” or “set up” by a nefarious conspiracy between the FBI, the Capitol Police and Nancy Pelosi. And formerly anti-Trump conservatives have latched on to the facile premise that Jan. 6 was merely a brief and unfortunate riot — nothing more. This, of course, ignores the months between Election Day and the attack on the Capitol, during which Trump absolutely attempted a self-coup.

Despite running a presidential campaign that went heavy on pitching the (correct) idea that Trump remains a unique threat to the survival of American democracy, Democrats failed to persuade enough voters. That said, 75 million Americans voted for Vice President Kamala Harris, and Trump’s roughly 1.5 percentage-point edge in the popular vote was the tightest margin since the 2000 Bush-Gore election. (In 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump by 2.1 percentage points in the popular vote.)

This means all hope is not lost that perhaps someday, Americans — maybe even Republicans too — will pass judgment on how it should be remembered as a historic moment for the United States of America.

I’m a devoutly nonpartisan independent and not one who regularly (or, really ever) praises congressional committees. But as citizens who maintain an allegiance to truth, democracy and the rule of law, we owe the Jan. 6 committee a debt of gratitude for its politically risky and thoroughly patriotic efforts.