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Read This Chapter in the January 6 Committee’s Report
Time is short. I’ll tell you what’s in my favorite chapter.
Everyone should read the final report of the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack (PDF). The committee interviewed a thousand witnesses and crunched a million documents to reach its conclusions, so this is valuable information.
To you, it’s free. Or nearly free. It’s yours for the low cost of taxes and a four-year Trump presidency culminating in an attempted coup that needed to be investigated.
Many people intend to read it. But as the PDF is 845 pages and it was published in late 2022, I realize that, if you haven’t read it yet, realistically you might not be getting around to it. So I’ll tell you what a general reader can get from the committee’s report, and in particular, what you’ll find in Chapter 5, my favorite chapter.
The High-Level View
The introduction, called an executive summary, takes up about a quarter of the report. The 17 key findings, about which I’ve previously written, are as follows.
Intending to overturn the election, Trump lied, everywhere and all the time, including in federal court filings. He conspired with John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, embraced and drove the fake elector scheme, and pressured everyone corruptly. Military officials had feared that Trump would order them to assist his plot. Fortunately, he lost his five dozen court cases.
Intelligence agencies didn’t guess how big the January 6 demonstration would be and they didn’t realize the extent to which Trump was behind it, though they did warn the Secret Service about violence by groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
Trump summoned the mob to Washington on January 6, told them to march to the Capitol, then watched the riot on TV for hours. During that period, the crowd chanted for the vice president’s head, the vice president was evacuated, and Trump posted a condemnation of the vice president to social media, knowing he was inflaming violence. Though Trump had the power to call the National Guard to quell the riot, he didn’t; the Secretary of Defense did.
