Predictable Result
The House committee that has held hearings on aspects of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, held another public hearing yesterday, at which they said they’d be referring the matter to the Department of Justice for criminal prosecution of former President Donald Trump on four counts.
The committee was a sham from the start, with findings that were predetermined. The republic would have been better served by a real investigation, but that doesn’t fit anyone’s political narrative in Washington.
All yesterday’s proceedings did was give the DOJ cover should it decided it would file criminal charges against Trump. No way the DOJ was ever going to rely solely on what some Congressional committee did; yes, they’ve been leaking and sharing all manner of information, but the Justice Department has had its own parallel proceeding and regardless of what the January 6th group determined, will choose to proceed or not based on their own investigation.
But here’s the cover…if DOJ does take the unprecedented action of filing criminal charges against a former-and-future president, one who is an active candidate to unseat the president currently in the White House, they can point to the “bipartisan” committee hearings, as if that gave the committee’s work a seal of non-partisan approval.
Having two anti-Trump Republicans on the committee, after rejecting Republican appointments made during the normal process, does not make it bipartisan. That’s how it will be framed by the formerly mainstream media, but it’s not.
The sideshow of the committee came to a close yesterday, and good riddance. Nothing they did will hold up in any forum other than one where they set the rules. It will be good to remember that, with the hope that unbiased, real investigators will continue their work separately. But I have a hard time believing that higher ups will allow an unbiased investigation to take place in an era of “stop Trump at all costs”.
