Who is the January 6 committee talking to? Over the past week, the committee has held three public hearings that offer a lucid, convincing and thorough account of Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election and the events leading up to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. The hearings have been choreographed and precise, scripted down to the word, building a clear case that Trump intentionally broke the law in the pursuit of perpetual power. The hearings, compelling as argument and surprisingly successful as television, betray a vision and discipline that is rare in congressional proceedings, and which would have been impossible if it were not for the absence of nearly all Republicans on the panel.
And yet, over the course of the committee’s three hearings to date, viewers have heard almost exclusively from Republicans. The public presentation of the committee’s findings relies heavily on videotaped depositions from members of the Trump campaign and the Trump administration. During the hearings’ opening night, last week, we heard from a montage of Trump-world figures, who testified under oath that they knew the 2020 election had been fairly conducted even as Trump told the public that it was stolen. It was two on-the-ground witnesses to the violence, a Capitol police officer and a British documentarian, who spoke about how brutal and chaotic the scene at the Capitol was. When it was the committee’s turn to characterize their findings, it was Liz Cheney – a rightwing ideologue from Wyoming – who did most of the talking.
