For many of those watching the first night of the Jan. 6 hearings, the footage from that day was as visceral and disturbing as ever. The sounds of the crowd, the sight of all those waving banners, the brutal scenes of Trump supporters battering police to the ground, and then breaking into the Capitol were shocking then. They’re shocking now. For many Americans, they’ve lost none of their poisonous impact.
Unless, of course, you’re a Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee, whose response to the hearing was a perfect distillation of their need to ignore what happened. The one tweet that the GOP members of the judiciary sent last night? “All. Old. News.” Sure, we tried to overthrow the nation, begged for pardons, lied about it, tried to keep these hearings from happening, and still want to convince Americans that the 2020 election was a fraud—but we failed. Now, let’s get back to the important work of pretending that Joe Biden is somehow raising your gas prices.
What won’t be old news? When some of those same Republicans members of the judiciary committee—which includes Jim Jordan, Louie Gohmert, Matt Gaetz, Andy Biggs, and Darrell Issa—turn up on the promised list of those who went begging to Donald Trump for a pardon over the role they played in taking the nation to the brink of destruction.
Because Thursday night’s hearing wasn’t the climax: It was the prelude to what’s coming.
While testifying on Thursday night, documentary filmmaker Nick Quested stated that, as he followed the Proud Boys from point to point on Jan. 6, he watched the crowd turn from “protesters to rioters to insurgents.” It was a transformation that everyone who was sitting stunned in front of their televisions on Jan. 6 witnessed, and the clips of that day brought home those moments again.
But those who tuned in on Thursday night saw tantalizing hints of what’s to come, and a good signal that scenes of militant white supremacists smashing through the windows of the Capitol are not going to be the most shocking revelations. Not even close. The most shocking scenes, the things that are really going to radiate out and turn from ripples into waves, were only hinted at.
We saw what’s coming in a single slide of conversations between Fox News’ Sean Hannity and former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, in which they openly weighed removing Trump under the 25th Amendment. We saw what’s coming in all the scenes—from a slouching William Barr, to Ivanka’s dead-eyed stare—where Trump ally after Trump ally admitted that they had always known there was nothing to the lies about a stolen election. And that Trump knew it, too.
We heard that tantalizing hint that there exists a list of Republicans who contacted Trump between Jan. 6 and the end of his time in the White House, seeking a pardon for their part in the conspiracy. We even heard it in the interviews that took place after the hearing, where Rep. Adam Schiff mentioned that, why yes, the committee did look into those “tours” that were being given in advance of Jan. 6, and that will be a topic for later hearings.
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On Jan. 6, Quested saw the crowd around him cross the line from lawful protest to lawless rioting to seditious insurrectionists. But the truth is that many of those he had come there to film—the Proud Boys and Oathkeepers among them—started out that morning already standing on that final square. They came to Washington, D.C., not with the intention of attending a protest, but of participating in an insurrection they had been planning for weeks. That’s exactly the charge many of them are already facing.
What should be causing many Republicans to check the list of nations that make extradition to the U.S. especially difficult were all the scenes in Thursday’s hearing that were not explicitly about the action of the mob on Jan. 6. Because the members of the committee have made it clear that the rest of this process is not going to be about revealing more shocking footage of jackasses in faux military gear strolling through the Capitol building. That part of the show is over.
The rest of the hearing is going to be building the case, brick by brick, to show how Donald Trump committed the same crime to which some of the Proud Boys have already pleaded guilty. It’s going to show how Trump and his followers engaged in a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States, using a pretense of election fraud that he, and everyone around him, knew was absolutely false right from the beginning. It’s going to show how they set up the situation on Jan. 6 to maximize pressure on Mike Pence and any others who were wavering in their support for Trump. It’s going to show how they used the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and every other member of that screaming mob as a weapon—one pointed at the heart of the nation.
And the committee is going to detail everyone who was a member of that conspiracy. It is going to name names. It is going to be All. New. Information.
Oh, and Jim Jordan? If you pick Bhutan for your exile, you’re going to need a jacket.