Jan. 6 summer hearings wrap up: What did we learn?

It was the season finale, if not the end of the series. Last night, the Jan. 6 House select committee wrapped up the last of eight summer hearings, in which they sought to demonstrate that former President Donald Trump bears responsibility for the attack on the U.S. Capitol. 

The final hearing focused directly on what Mr. Trump was doing for the 187 minutes between when the Capitol was breached and when he released a video from the Rose Garden urging rioters to go home.

If one thinks of this congressional investigation as a connect-the-dots puzzle, the basic outline was already known before the select committee began its work. But the committee put forward many more dots – via hundreds of witness interviews and 140,000 documents gathered – in an attempt to present a sharper final picture of presidential culpability.

Over the course of six weeks, the committee sought to prove that Mr. Trump, who is widely expected to announce a 2024 presidential run, is unfit for public office, and that he willfully deceived his supporters about his electoral defeat in a desperate bid to stay in power.

“He is preying on their patriotism,” said Vice Chair Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, in her closing statement of the prime-time hearing. “On Jan. 6, Donald Trump turned their love of country into a weapon against our Capitol and our Constitution.”

The committee also suggested Mr. Trump might bear criminal responsibility, though legal scholars disagree on whether the evidence presented by the panel warrants bringing charges against the former president. Some now see a strong case against Mr. Trump, potentially for multiple crimes, ranging from defrauding the public to assisting an insurrection. Those charges could be further bolstered by the countless hours of depositions not yet released, which may include additional relevant details. 

“Either he realized he lost or deliberately hid the truth from himself. And then he proceeded to do everything that he could possibly do without any regard for harm to other people, or to the country, without any regard to the law in order to overturn the election,” says Laurence Tribe, a professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University. “All of this adds up to very serious federal crimes.”

Others say that while the hearings have exposed reprehensible, even immoral, behavior on the part of the former president, they fell short of establishing criminal culpability. 

“A president’s failure to ‘do the right thing,’ – and that’s a direct quote from the committee – is a political rather than criminal judgment,” says Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has been critical of the committee’s lack of GOP-appointed members and robust questioning. 

Still, while he doesn’t see a strong legal case against Mr. Trump, he says the hearings have played a valuable role in creating a comprehensive record of the events leading up to Jan. 6 and the attack on the Capitol.

“The committee has contributed a great deal in making details and accounts public,” says Professor Turley. “These are very disturbing and at times breathtaking accounts. The evidence ranges from the horrific to the heroic.”

Many of the hearings included graphic images of the violence of that day, scenes which were often difficult to watch. Several police officers who had battled the crowds at the Capitol attended the hearings in person and at various times could be seen with their heads in their hands. At the conclusion of most hearings, the committee members would file off the dais to shake hands with – or in many instances embrace – the witnesses, thanking them for sharing their stories.

Last night, Representative Cheney praised the witnesses who had been willing to come forward, including Cassidy Hutchinson, the young aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. “She knew all along that she would be attacked by President Trump and by the 50-, 60-, and 70-year-old men who hide themselves behind executive privilege,” she said. “But like our witnesses today, she has courage, and she did it anyway.”

Outlines now filled in

The broad contours of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric and actions leading up to Jan. 6 have been known for more than a year. Amid a rapid scaling up of mail-in voting during the pandemic, he began questioning the validity of the 2020 election results before voting even started. Then he persisted in falsely claiming that he had won, even after all but one of the 62 lawsuits his team brought had failed or been thrown out. He pressured the Department of Justice to find evidence of fraud, and when Attorney General Bill Barr said there was none on a scale to overturn the election, the president turned to state election officials, who likewise did not find any such evidence. 

Then, in what many saw as a last-ditch and unconstitutional attempt, he tried pressuring state legislators to nominate alternative slates of electors. The idea was that when Congress met on Jan. 6 to count the Electoral College votes, a process overseen by Vice President Mike Pence, they could delay or overturn Joe Biden’s victory. When Mr. Pence made clear that morning that he did not believe he had the constitutional authority to unilaterally accept or reject the electoral votes, Mr. Trump encouraged the massive crowd rallying near the White House to march to the Capitol. As rioters breached the building and engaged with law enforcement, he did nothing to stop the violence for hours. 

The committee filled in new details within that narrative arc, bringing Republican lawyers, state election officials, and state legislators to testify in person, as well as former White House officials. Together with selected clips of videotaped depositions of former Trump aides, the committee outlined a pattern of behavior that they say demonstrated Mr. Trump willfully deceived his supporters into believing the election was stolen, and deliberately sent angry protesters, some of whom he knew to be armed, to disrupt the proceedings at the Capitol and pressure Mr. Pence and members of Congress as they began counting the Electoral College votes. 

Some of the most attention-grabbing details of the eight hearings came from Ms. Hutchinson, the White House aide, who testified that Mr. Trump was told some of the protesters were armed but had nevertheless asked the Secret Service to let them into his rally, saying they weren’t there to hurt him. She also related an account she’d been told by another official, that when Mr. Trump was informed he could not join the protesters at the Capitol, he tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential vehicle and lunged for the neck of a Secret Service agent – an account that both Mr. Trump and, reportedly, Secret Service agents have denied. And she testified that when the president was told some rioters were yelling, “Hang Mike Pence,” Mr. Trump said he thought the vice president deserved it – something she pieced together from two conversations she had heard.

Last night’s testimony included an audio clip, distorted for security reasons, of someone identified only as a “White House security official,” who said that Secret Service agents in the Capitol on Jan. 6 became afraid for their lives, relaying goodbyes to their families, and warning that they might need to use lethal force to protect Mr. Pence.

Diverging views

While only two of the committee’s nine members are Republicans, and both are outspoken critics of Mr. Trump, nearly all of the testimony was given by Republicans who had supported or worked for the former president. Still, many Trump supporters have criticized the highly scripted nature of the hearings and lack of cross-examination to explore other possible motives or interpretations, or to evaluate the accuracy of witnesses’ recollections of an intense day more than 18 months ago. 

Ms. Cheney addressed those criticisms in her remarks last night. “Do you really think that Bill Barr is such a delicate flower that he would wilt under cross-examination?” she asked, and then went through a list of other members of Mr. Trump’s inner circle who had testified. “Of course not. None of these witnesses are.”

Professor Tribe – who once taught two committee members, Reps. Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin, and is friends with both – says the hearings have provided stronger evidence than the impeachment proceedings on whether Mr. Trump incited an insurrection. He says it could now be “quite easily proven” that the former president defrauded the American people and obstructed a congressional proceeding. He even sees a pathway for prosecuting more serious crimes, including engaging in and assisting an insurrection against the authority of the United States, which would render Mr. Trump ineligible to ever hold office again, as well as seditious conspiracy, punishable by 20 years in prison.

Professor Turley disagrees, expressing skepticism that any of the crimes enumerated by Professor Tribe could be proven in court. He notes, for example, that the District of Columbia’s attorney general already investigated Mr. Trump for insurrection and never brought charges. 

“The committee members said at the outset that they had uncovered what Representative Schiff called compelling evidence of criminal conduct by President Trump,” he says. “We have yet to see that evidence materialize.”

One question to consider is what else the Jan. 6 committee may have gleaned from witness depositions that it chose not to include in the tightly focused presentations to the nation. 

“What was on TV was for the general public – not for a judge or for legal experts. And therefore, it’s understandable that they tried not to spend too much time on details that might matter in court,” says Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia who researches constitutional law. “I would guess that many of those kinds of things were in fact asked about in the depositions.”