The Jan. 6 committee begins hearings with a big challenge: Capture public attention
Whether the public hearings will be considered a success for Democrats largely depends on what comes after and whether legislation or prosecutions follow.
June 6, 2022, 3:32 AM CDT
By Peter Nicholas and Scott Wong
Seldom has a set of congressional hearings opened amid so much anticipation and, at the same time, so little guarantee of success.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold the first of at least a half-dozen public hearings this week, having already promised stunning revelations that would lay bare just how dangerously close the U.S. came to losing its democracy.
“It’s all about democratic resiliency. Can we fortify our institutions and our people against insurrection, coups and violence?” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., a committee member, told NBC News. “I hope we will be able to spur the country to make the necessary reforms to solidify democracy.”
But what will success look like? The question has weighed on committee members and congressional Democrats who have invited the panel to present both a definitive accounting of the riot and tangible solutions to prevent another.
What comes later is likely to determine whether the committee’s work is judged a success or a failure, according to interviews with more than 20 committee members, other lawmakers, witnesses, congressional aides and political strategists.
As the panel sees it, the hearings can’t just come and go. Members are looking for accountability. The committee isn’t a law enforcement body, so it can’t prosecute anyone. Yet if members lay out a compelling story about the far-flung effort to deny Joe Biden his rightful victory, it could pressure the Justice Department to ramp up its own inquiry.
“I am really very hopeful that what [the committee] will produce will be a road map — not just for Congress, but for the Department of Justice and for the American people who want to preserve our democracy,” Rep. Veronica Escobar, D-Texas, who was trapped in the gallery of the House chamber during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, said in an interview.
If the committee is to succeed on its own terms, members will need to stoke enough outrage that voters demand concrete actions preventing anyone else from subverting the peaceful transfer of power. They’ll need to leave a national audience sufficiently alarmed that the politicians and prosecutors who track public opinion decide they must act and act now.
That won’t be easy. A slew of leaks in the run-up to the hearings could leave viewers with a feeling they’ve heard it all before. What’s more, a year and a half after that harrowing afternoon when a violent mob tried to stop certification of Biden’s victory, many Americans have moved on. A Quinnipiac poll in January showed that 44 percent of the country believed too much was being made of the attack on the Capitol, compared to only 38 percent five months earlier.
There’s no doubt that the committee is well positioned to sway opinion. The first hearing will open in prime time with wide network news coverage (Fox News, a conservative outlet, didn’t respond to an inquiry about whether it would carry the hearing live). Over the course of the month, the panel will show video of the events surrounding Jan. 6 that the public has never seen , while publicizing hours of testimony from people tied to Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election.
As the hearings unfold, members are expected to show that the Trump forces knew they had lost in 2020 yet pushed the baseless claim that the election was stolen anyway. They will lay out how the former president and his associates implored then-Vice President Mike Pence to block certification of Biden’s win even though he had no authority to do so as the electoral votes were tallied. And they’re likely to reveal what Trump did and didn’t do in the West Wing in the hours when a mob breached the Capitol in a violent effort to keep him in power.
Two witnesses who the committee hopes will testify publicly are Marc Short and Greg Jacob, senior Pence advisers who were with him in the Capitol when rioters stormed the building, looking to hang him.
A Republican who has informally advised committee members said: “There’s a sense within the committee that there is a very limited period for them to do this and win public opinion. There’s been this concern that even if they report their findings, does the Justice Department do anything with that? So they’re trying to figure out how to maximize telling the story to the public.”
Equally important to the committee is shoring up a democracy that, when it was challenged, proved more fragile than most Americans had suspected. A triumph for the committee would be for the hearings to advance legislation — now languishing in Congress — to stop candidates from exploiting ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act, the 19th century law that controls how presidents are elected. A bipartisan group of senators has been meeting quietly to revamp the law but has made scant progress.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/jan-6-committee-begins-hearings-big-challenge-capture-public-attention-rcna29868
