Not since the Watergate hearings has a congressional committee captured the nation’s attention to such profound effect.
- The inquiry has tracked what Trump was doing behind closed doors at the White House on Jan. 6.
- Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has seen a political career crashed, and launched, for serving on the panel.
- Even Trump has questioned the House GOP’s decision not to participate in the investigation.
The final report from the Jan. 6 committee is still weeks or months away, but the special House panel appointed to investigate last year’s assault on the Capitol already has changed the political world.
Even before what may be its final public hearing on Thursday, the special committee has revealed behind-the-scenes details about what happened that day and reshaped attitudes toward Trump among some voters. The panel has propelled the prominence of his chief nemesis on the committee, and it has tested how Congress can do the job of oversight.
The repercussions are notable given that the panel was launched 15 months ago amid a partisan furor. Senate Republicans filibustered a proposal to form an independent, bipartisan Jan. 6 commission. When House Speaker Nancy Pelosi then created a special House committee, she rejected two of the five members Republican leader Kevin McCarthy proposed, prompting the GOP to refuse to officially participate at all. Skeptics argued there wasn’t much left to learn.
Yet not since the Senate Watergate hearings a half-century ago has a congressional committee captured the nation’s attention to such profound effect.
Trump knew: Jan. 6 committee uses voices of those close to him to make its case of ‘an attempted coup’
Here’s a look at what the Jan. 6 committee has done, and how.
1. Tracking Trump
It wasn’t hard to see what the rioters who breached the Capitol were doing on Jan. 6, 2021. They were captured in a thousand videos, often recorded on their own cellphones, as they smashed windows, doused Capitol police officers with bear spray, climbed onto the Senate dais, and roamed through the Speaker’s suite, shouting menacingly, “Where’s Nancy?”
But the Jan. 6 committee has now also revealed what Trump was doing behind closed doors at the White House, in the lead-up to the defiant “Stop the Steal” rally he addressed on the Ellipse at noon that day, and during the violent hours that followed.
Testimony from White House aides, a former attorney general, even the president’s older daughter showed Trump had been told by his own top officials that he had lost the 2020 election, fair and square. They described a president who sometimes seemed unhinged as he tried to overturn those results, smashing his lunch plate against the wall in anger and scuffling with a Secret Service agent in his limousine. They detailed the 187 minutes he stayed publicly silent and out of sight as mayhem on his behalf erupted on the Hill.
What did Trump do on Jan. 6?: A breakdown of the 187 minutes Trump was out of view on Jan. 6 as aides urged him to act
This time, it wasn’t what he did. It was what he wouldn’t do as a mob attacked the Capitol
It is true that the committee’s hearings haven’t significantly changed views toward him or that day among Republicans, most of whom remain on Trump’s side, or among Democrats, who were already solidly against him. But a USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll taken after the hearings found that almost a third of independents, 31%, said the panel’s presentations made them view the attack as more serious than they had thought before.
There is more ahead: The committee’s final conclusions haven’t yet been reached, and its most explosive decisions, including whether to recommend the Justice Department undertake a criminal investigation of Trump, haven’t yet been made.
2. Costing, and launching, a career
Liz Cheney was a three-term congresswoman from Wyoming and a rising figure in the House GOP leadership, considered a possible future senator or House speaker. She was a member of one of the GOP’s leading families, the daughter of a vice president who had the partisan credentials of being demonized by Democrats.
Then came the Jan. 6 assault.
Cheney had voted against Trump’s first impeachment, undertaken for attempting to extract a political favor from Ukraine’s president by using U.S. military aid as a lure. But after the storming of the Capitol, she voted in favor of his second impeachment on a charge of “incitement of insurrection.” She and another renegade Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, agreed to serve on the Jan. 6 committee, giving the inquiry some patina of bipartisanship.
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During the hearings, she has emerged as a leading voice denouncing Trump for an attack on democratic fundamentals and chastising fellow Republicans for failing to stand up to him.
For all that, she was first pushed out of her leadership post, as chair of the House Republican Caucus, then faced the ire of Trump and his supporters in her bid for a fourth term in Congress. Two years earlier, she had won the Republican nomination for Wyoming’s sole House seat with 75% of the primary vote; in August, she carried just 29% of the primary vote in a rout by challenger Harriet Hageman.
She lost her standing in her state, but she has gained a megaphone nationwide. Despite her conservative credentials on policy, the hearings have made her an icon to many Democrats and a pariah in her own party. Her approval rating was a dismal 20% among Republicans, a USA TODAY poll found. But her rating among Democrats was more than triple that, at 63%.
More: Liz Cheney on Ron DeSantis, Mike Pence testifying to Jan. 6 panel and her own future
During the final weeks of the midterm election season, she has vowed to campaign against Republican candidates who back Trump’s debunked assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. When she leaves Congress in January, what her next role might be, and where, isn’t clear.
But she doesn’t rule out a run for the White House. That is “something I’m thinking about,” she says.
3. Telling a story
The Jan. 6 committee has succeeded in turning a set of congressional hearings, typically dry and dense affairs, into a serial drama – more Netflix than C-SPAN.
The cast of ch