Jan. 6 panel urges insurrection charge against Donald Trump

For Donald Trump’s haters, watching Monday’s choreographed condemnation of the former president’s actions to overturn the 2020 election provided that which all dramas going back to the ancient Greeks have sought to provide.

Catharsis.

An opportunity to vent — once again, or once and for all — the pent-up emotion that Trump’s roller-coaster of chaos has caused to build up in the body politic.

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot found that as the nation’s top lawmaker, its commander-in-chief, Trump committed criminal acts to try to stay in power, the gravest being the crime of insurrection.

“He summoned a mob to Washington and, knowing they were armed and angry, pointed them to the Capitol and told them to fight like hell,” said Bennie Thompson, the Democratic committee chair. “There’s no doubt about this.”

Blue-state Democratic voters would be hard-pressed to disagree with Rep. Thompson, of Mississippi. But obtaining justice, in the form of actual criminal charges, is a matter for Department of Justice prosecutors to decide.

But will the mass of evidence about Trump’s allegedly criminal wrongdoing be enough to plant doubt in the minds of those for whom the ex-president has never and could never do wrong?

It seems unlikely that the Jan. 6 committee’s full report, to be released Wednesday, will be the dent in Trump’s political armour that leads to his undoing. But the clear, methodical, show-and-tell form that committee members used to make their case may serve as another warning to wary Republicans being asked to once again back Trump as their candidate for the 2024 presidential election.

Some will certainly only see it as partisan political theatre, and it’s true that only two of the committee members making the case against Trump were Republicans (and both of their terms in office end in a few weeks as the new year begins).

But the intensity of feeling that resulted two years ago in the centre of American democracy being battered and tarnished has significantly receded.

As a result, America’s collective nerves were a great deal less jangled Monday when Trump reacted to the criminal referrals with claims that “They’re going after me because they are really going after you!”

Mistrust is still rampant in American politics, though it is perhaps less centred on the figure of Trump and become more generalized.

This may be the enduring legacy of the allegedly criminal scheme laid out by the Jan. 6 committee — one that involved the sowing of doubt in the weeks between the November 2020 election won by Joe Biden and the Jan. 6, 2021, meeting to make it official by certifying the electoral college votes.

The committee heard evidence that Trump urged state officials to declare victory in his favour and took extreme measures when met with refusals.

These included threatening Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger with criminal prosecution and allegedly creating and distributing fake certificates of electoral college votes, to call the authenticity of the real certificates into question.

It’s for this latter act that the committee is recommending Trump also be charged with conspiracy to make a false statement.

It wasn’t just a Hail Mary, post-election gambit that was dreamed up in the desperation of defeat.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, said Trump was carrying out a “pre-meditated plan” conceived weeks before the election to baselessly declare vote fraud as a way of ensuring his own victory.

He instrumentalized the sentiment that the election had been stolen, raising “hundreds of millions of dollars” from online donors and then using it, in some cases to hire lawyers that allegedly attempted to sway the testimony of witnesses called to testify before the Jan. 6 committee.

“One lawyer told a witness that (she) could in certain circumstances tell the committee that she didn’t recall facts when she actually did recall them,” Lofgren said.

“We’ve learned that a (witness) was offered potential employment that would make her ‘financially very comfortable’ as the date of her testimony approached by entities that were apparently linked to Donald Trump and his associates.”

Trump also tried, and failed, to sway his own vice-president, Mike Pence. He berated him, calling him a “wimp” for not going along with the plan to refuse to certify the election results on that fateful day.

Trump then tweeted that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution,” which kicked off the Capitol protesters’ angry calls to “Hang Mike Pence.”

For these acts, the committee is recommending Trump be charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding.

“The whole purpose and obvious effect of Trump’s scheme were to obstruct, influence and impede this official proceeding, the central moment for the lawful transfer of power in the United States,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat from Maryland.

When none of these attempts to overturn the presidential election result bore fruit, Trump allegedly turned to his mob, the foot soldiers in his Make America Great Again army.

As Stephen Ayres, a now-repentant protester who testified before the committee last summer (his words were played again Monday to hammer home the point): “The president got everybody riled up and told everybody to head on down. So we basically were just following what he said.”

On Wednesday, the committee’s final report comes out. Then, Justice Department prosecutors are left to tread over the fragile terrain left in the Capitol riot’s wake.

Just like the case of Trump’s possibly criminal handling of the classified documents, it can’t be considered without consideration of the politics and the potential political repercussions of charging a former president with a crime.

So far federal prosecutors have taken the assault on the temple of American political power incredibly seriously. Last month Stewart Rhodes, leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers militia, was convicted of seditious conspiracy.

Another criminal trial on the same charges opened Monday against members of the Proud Boys, a far-right group listed as a terrorist organization in Canada.

But just as any probe of street-level drug dealers must ultimately look up the chain to the cartel kingpin, so, too, must prosecutors turn to those who set the conditions for the Jan. 6 protest, said Raskin.

“Ours is not a system of justice where foot soldiers go to jail and the masterminds and ringleaders get a free pass.”

Allan Woods is a Montreal-based staff reporter for the Star. He covers global and national affairs. Follow him on Twitter: @WoodsAllan

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