Chairman Bennie Thompson gave the overview, and Vice-Chair Liz Cheney delivered the punch. She meticulously laid out quotes and videos of Trump's own people — including his attorney general, his campaign lawyer and even his own daughter — admitting the then-president had lost the election and asserting there was no evidence of fraud.
Given Cheney's capacious tendering of Trump's dirty laundry, the House Select Committee to Investigate the Jan. 6 Attack on the United States Capitol could conceivably halt here and immediately proceed with sending a criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice. The committee's remaining presentations will but elaborate on the evidence presented last night. Thompson, Cheney et al. could pack it up, seal it and forward it, placing the miscreant's fate in the hands of federal prosecutors.
Unactionable yet disgraceful was a concomitant crime committed Thursday night. Fox News had an opportunity to demonstrate that it indeed possessed at least some fidelity to the national interest rather than coddling to the underbelly of American coarseness, its television audience of the eternally belligerent and gravely benighted. It chose the latter route, concealing from that audience the manifest proof of Trump's crimes.
Worse, the network proceeded to deride the committee hearings. I tuned in for a few seconds to Tucker Carlson, whose guest was saying it's a shame that Americans are not hearing "the truth." Carlson wrapped the interview by saying his guest's analysis was "really smart." A few other seconds spent with Sean Hannity at the top of the next hour found him focusing on the committee's deplorable partisanship. Fox News has done many sordid disservices to this country; last night topped them all put together.
There was another audience, however — a more powerful, determinant audience of one, Attorney General Merrick Garland. With surgical precision Rep. Chaney itemized the committee's bill of damning particulars against Trump. The public record of his crimes was already spilling off the page, and to that Ms. Cheney added yet more, though most of it, too, was previously known. The evidence she presented against Trump was both immense and incontestable; nevertheless, nearly a year and a half has passed with no DOJ indictment of the seditionist, would-be autocrat.
If Mr. Garland is personally reluctant to engage a criminal prosecution of the twice-impeached president, which he appears to be, then he should hand his urgent duty over to the criminal division's assistant attorney general. Trump will soon announce another White House bid, rendering prosecution then even more controversial and less tenable. If Garland waits until he simply cannot wait any longer, given the vastness of evidence against Trump, then he will have etched in stone the Department of Justice's appearance of politics — the very thing he has tried to avoid.
For years the overriding political narrative has been that the rot of the Republican Party predated Trump, he only exploited it. While it's true that the GOP is Dorian Gray's counterpart, we must also acknowledge that it was Trump who singlehandedly and without precedent attempted an overthrow of the U.S. government and incubated the Big Lie's enduring perniciousness. His unrelenting falsehood could nonviolently bring down American democracy by stripping voters of confidence in free and fair elections. Hence the Jan. 6 committee's overriding charge is to expose this singularity of rot — and bring it to justice.
What cannot be brought to a proper view of justice are millions of Trump voters and Fox News viewers, though one in the same. Precious few minds will be changed as a result of the committee's primetime "spectacle," as one of Hannity's guests characterized the hearings last night. The pestilent troika of Carlson, Hannity & Ingraham will cement willful and widespread indifference to what is, for once, a true existential threat — to America's liberal democracy.
Their viewers' indifference will morph into greater and greater hostility as the Jan. 6 hearings proceed. Thus Trump & Co. will have achieved what they much desire, second only to power: a hardening of society's dividing line. It's not Justice Kavanaugh who shall be endangered, but Justice itself. Trump is seeking its nullification among the body politic's jury pool, which could turn violent should real justice be pursued. DOJ's preemption of the threat's boiling point, then, is critical.
At stake is King Lear's juridical assessment, for too long the stuff of the undeservingly privileged. "Through tattered clothes great vices do appear; Robes and furred gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold and the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks. Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw does pierce it."
Is this to be shouted in anger once again, with thwarted rectitude's spittle flecking the face of America's rule of law?