What’s the point of the continued weeks-long exercise of airing regurgitated findings from the Congressional committee investigating the events of Jan. 6, 2021?
According to Rep. Bennie Thompson, chairman of the committee, the intention is not to refer anyone for criminal charges, including former President Donald Trump. Instead, Thompson said the committee will produce a report and make all their materials available to the public. Criminal referrals are “not their job,” according to Thompson.
This news must be defeating for Democrats and Trump-hating viewers who seemed giddy at the thought of charges stemming from committee findings that the former president actively and openly encouraged an “insurrection” at the Capitol Building.
The panel seemed split over the issue until Thompson ended the speculation by saying it wasn’t the committee’s job to send over criminal referrals:
The chair of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot said Monday night that the panel will not make any criminal referrals, even though its leaders have previously hinted at the possibility of doing so.
“Our job is to look at the facts and circumstances around January 6 — what caused it — and make recommendations after that,” Chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., told reporters as he left the House chamber after the second day of public hearings by the panel.
When pressed on the matter and whether the committee had ruled out the possibility of referring criminal charges, particularly for former President Donald Trump, Thompson replied: “We don’t have authority.”
In other words, the televised hearings and slickly produced videos, which often cut and edit certain aspects of Trump’s words, are all for show. It’s a “shock and awe” campaign intended to drive public sentiment against the former president without any meat on the bone of alleged criminal activity such as inciting a riot or some kind of “sedition” charge.
Why then would House Speaker Pelosi go to the trouble of assembling the committee and giving them $8 million in taxpayer dollars to conduct an investigation and get primetime television coverage?
It’s quite simple. The goal is not criminal indictments, it’s to prevent Trump from running again in 2024. There’s a reason the committee findings have been dragged on for this long, to get them timed in an election year when a slightly larger handful of people are paying attention to politics.
Even now, few suspect or suggest that beyond the current round of “revelations” from the hearings, it will even matter in a few weeks when gas hits $5.50 a gallon nationally and the Biden administration is still failing the country?
Furthermore, many of the so-called “revelations” coming out from the committee, such as former Attorney General Bill Barr calling Trump’s election fraud claims “bullsh*t” were not new at all and have been kicking around for months.
The Jan 6. select committee is a show trial paid for by taxpayer dollars meant to benefit the Democratic Party in an election year and try to prevent Donald Trump from running for President again of continuing to peddle influence on the Republican Party.
As writer Eddie Scarry notes at The Federalist, the damning revelations dropped by the committee so far offer nothing in terms of prosecutable crimes by anyone involved in the Trump administration:
I get that Democrats are trying to make a broader case that Trump’s election claims were part of a conspiracy that ultimately led to the riot in the Capitol in 2021, but if reaching that point first requires that they ignore the gaping holes in the fundamental assertion that Trump purposefully lied to the public, the committee hearings are basically just re-runs of Lawrence O’Donnell’s programming of the past year.
And we haven’t even gotten started on the role that the pandemic hysteria and Black Lives Matter violence, intentionally instigated and exacerbated by Democrats, played in the lead-up to Jan. 6. I’m sure the committee will use at least one day to get into that. Surely!
Aside from Democrats eager to lap up another round of Trump-bashing, the kind they’re no longer getting from CNN every night, there isn’t much to be accomplished from a highly partisan show trial conducted at taxpayer expense produced by a former ABC News executive.
