House Opens Jan. 6 Investigation Over Republican
Opposition
With all but two Republicans voting no, the House
created a select committee, controlled by Democrats, to scrutinize the security
failures and root causes that contributed to the Capitol riot.
By Luke
Broadwater
June 30,
2021
WASHINGTON
— The House voted mostly along party lines on Wednesday to create a select
committee to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, pushing ahead over
near-unanimous Republican opposition with a broad inquiry controlled by
Democrats into the deadliest attack on Congress in centuries.
The panel,
established at the behest of Speaker Nancy Pelosi after Senate Republicans
blocked the formation of a bipartisan independent commission to scrutinize the
assault, will investigate what its organizing resolution calls “the facts,
circumstances and causes relating to the Jan. 6, 2021, domestic terrorist
attack.”
The
13-member panel, which has subpoena power, will have eight members named by the
majority party and five with input from Republicans, and is meant to examine
President Donald J. Trump’s role in inspiring the riot. While the measure
creating it does not mention him, it charges the committee with looking at the
law enforcement and government response to the storming of the Capitol and “the
influencing factors that fomented such an attack on American representative
democracy while engaged in a constitutional process.”
It passed
by a vote of 222 to 190, with only two Republicans joining Democrats to support
it.
“We have a
duty to the Constitution and to the American people to find the truth of Jan. 6
and to ensure that such an assault on our democracy can never happen again,”
Ms. Pelosi said, calling Jan. 6 “one of the darkest days of our history.”
“The sheer
scale of the violence of that day is shocking,” she added. “But what is just as
shocking is remembering why this violence occurred: to block the certification
of an election and the peaceful transfer of power that is the cornerstone of
our democracy.”
Several
officers who responded to the riot that day were on hand to watch the vote from
Ms. Pelosi’s box in the House gallery. They included Harry Dunn of the Capitol Police
and two District of Columbia police officers, Michael Fanone, who has lobbied
Republicans to support an investigation, and Daniel Hodges, who was crushed in
a door during the rampage. Relatives of Brian D. Sicknick, a Capitol Police
officer who died after clashing with the rioters, joined them.
While the
measure says that five members of the panel are to be named “after consultation
with the minority leader,” Representative Kevin McCarthy, Republican of
California, he has not said whether he will recommend anyone. Last week, he
told Mr. Fanone and Mr. Dunn in a private meeting that he would take the
appointment process seriously, even as he declined to publicly denounce members
of his party who have sought to downplay or spread lies about the riot.
Ms. Pelosi
is considering picking a Republican who has acknowledged the gravity of the
attack for one of her eight slots, according to an aide. But her options are
exceedingly slim.
Shortly
after the breach, many Republicans expressed outrage and vowed to hold the
perpetrators accountable. But their support for an investigation has eroded
steadily in the months since, and all but evaporated after Mr. Trump issued a
statement in May calling the idea of an independent inquiry a “Democrat trap.”
Many have
speculated that Ms. Pelosi might select Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming,
who was removed from her House leadership post after she pushed Republicans to
hold themselves and Mr. Trump responsible for fomenting the riot with the lie
that the 2020 election had been stolen.
Ms. Cheney,
one of only 35 House Republicans who voted to create the independent
commission, which was to be modeled after the one that investigated the Sept.
11, 2001, attacks, also broke with her party on Wednesday to vote in favor of
forming the panel.
“I believe
this select committee is our only remaining option,” she said in a statement.
“The committee should issue and enforce subpoenas promptly, hire skilled
counsel, and do its job thoroughly and expeditiously.”
Only one
other Republican, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, an outspoken
critic of Mr. Trump, supported the move.
Few
Republicans spoke during the debate and about two dozen missed the vote
altogether to fly to the southern border to attend an event with Mr. Trump, who
praised some of them by name.
But whether
in person or remotely, the party lined up in opposition to the panel, which
their leaders insisted would be a one-sided forum for Democrats to censure Mr.
Trump and try to kneecap Republicans in the 2022 elections.
Representative
Michelle Fischbach, Republican of Minnesota, argued that the committee would
duplicate existing investigations and engage in “partisan, divisive politics.”
“We gave
you bipartisan,” Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts,
responded, referring to the proposed independent inquiry, which would have had
an equal number of Democrat- and Republican-appointed members. “Give me a
break. This is clear: They don’t want to get to the truth.”
In
particular, the select committee is charged with investigating failures in law
enforcement, such as intelligence gathering, and the root causes that
influenced so many to turn violent, scrutinizing online platforms and any
potential “malign foreign influence operations.”
During the
debate on Wednesday, several Democrats spoke of the emotional toll Jan. 6 had
taken on them. Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California — who was
shot in 1978 on a remote airstrip in Guyana during the Jonestown massacre,
which killed her boss at the time, Representative Leo J. Ryan, Democrat of
California, and four others — recalled being trapped in the House chamber and
hearing a gunshot outside.
“My heart
is racing right now and I’m trembling,” she said, thinking back on Jan. 6. “I
thought at that moment, ‘My God, I survived Guyana. But I’m not going to
survive this in the house of democracy.’ ”
Representative
Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York and chairwoman of the Oversight and
Reform Committee, called the riot, which unfolded as Congress officially
tallied electoral votes to formalize President Biden’s victory, “one of the
most shattering times of my life — to see the work of our government violated
and stopped by an insurrection.”
“I don’t
know what would have happened if they had captured the vice president,” Ms.
Maloney said, referring the mob’s threats to hang Mike Pence, for whom they
built a gallows outside the Capitol. “His life would have been in danger, no
question.”
Nearly 140
police officers were injured in the attack and at least seven people died in
connection with it, including two officers who were on duty on Jan. 6 and later
took their own lives.
Several
investigations into the assault are already underway, but none have a mandate
to look comprehensively at the event similar to the fact-finding commissions
that scrutinized Sept. 11, the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the
assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
The F.B.I.
has arrested nearly 500 people involved in the Jan. 6 breach, and is pursuing
potentially hundreds more, the agency’s director told Congress. Several
congressional committees are conducting their own investigations, including two
Senate panels that outlined large-scale failures that contributed to the assault.
And several inspectors general have begun their own inquiries, finding lapses
and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War
of 1812.
The select
committee is similar in design to the panel the Republican-controlled House
formed in 2014 to investigate an attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi,
Libya, which Democrats denounced as intended to damage the presidential
prospects of Hillary Clinton, who had been secretary of state at the time. It
ultimately became one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan
congressional investigations in history.
That panel
was made up of seven Republicans and five Democrats.
Luke
Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of
investigative articles at the Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a
George Polk Award in 2020. @lukebroadwater
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