Trump response to Jan. 6 committee referral shows why an indictment would help him
Trump response to Jan. 6 hearing and committee criminal referral to Justice Department and report shows why an indictment on insurrection would help him.
The U.S. House’s Jan. 6 committee has performed its task with a dignity that verges on parody. Their solemnity was justified; an investigation into a violent ambush of elected officials at the U.S. Capitol wouldn’t play right with a laugh track. At the same time, such seriousness could also come off at times as a precious lack of self-awareness: Couldn’t they have at least acknowledged, just once, that the machinery of traditional politics, mainstream media and the law has separately and in concert been trying for years to encumber former President Donald Trump with but a single meaningful consequence for a myriad of things (financial corruption, sexual assault — hey, remember he was impeached, twice!) and so far have failed?
For Trump, the absolute pinnacle of power is to have other people do what you want. Getting them to execute on something stupid and dangerous? Even more evidence he has control over them.
I suppose it would have undermined the enterprise to ask comedian John Oliver to stop by and perform his “We got him!” meme as a live finale to the whole thing at the last committee meeting on Monday, but that’s the ending that kept playing through my head.
Yet it’s fanciful to think that the nonbinding criminal referral the House made to the Justice Department recommending charges be brought against Trump will actually play out with the soul-satisfying sight of Trump being frog-marched down the Mar-a-Lago porte-cochère. Committee Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., may have assured us that “prosecutors are considering the implications of the conduct that we describe in our report,” but given the tenuous nature of all congressional criminal referrals, I suspect almost all of those prosecutors “considering the implications” of the report are the former ones talking about it on TV.
Absent even the briefest acknowledgement of the long and doubtful journey of the recommended charges unanimously approved at Monday’s meeting, the end of the committee felt a bit like lawmakers play-acting at democracy even as protections against tyranny continue to quake if not actually crumble. They are doing criminal referrals while Rome burns.
Rating: 5