Dem
51
GOP
49
For Trump haters, today is going to be an early Christmas. Or maybe an early Festivus, since it will most certainly feature an airing of grievances. The Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 coup attempt will hold its final public meeting at 1 p.m. EST. It is expected that the Committee will summarize its findings and then vote on referring various people to the DoJ for criminal prosecution. One recommendation widely expected is asking the DoJ to indict Donald Trump for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress. Another is to ask the DoJ to indict Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States. The Committee does not have the power to indict Trump or anyone else. All it can do is ask the DoJ to do it and provide the DoJ with mountains of evidence explaining why it should do so and material to use in any trial against him.
Trump probably won't be the only target. The Committee may also recommend criminal proceedings for Mark Meadows and possibly others. It may also recommend that some of Trump's lawyers be disbarred.
A somewhat sticky point is dealing with five Republican members of the House who defied subpoenas. These are Reps. Andy Biggs (AZ), Mo Brooks (AL), Jim Jordan (OH), Kevin McCarthy (CA), and Scott Perry (PA). The Committee could try to censure them or refer them to the (toothless) House Ethics Committee. The ultimate penalty would be to refer them to the DoJ for prosecution. They did violate federal law, but having one party recommending that members of the other party be prosecuted would not further friendly relations within the House. But maybe at this point the Democrats don't care about that.
The Committee has three teams at work finalizing the report. The gold team is looking at Trump and Republican members of Congress. The red team is looking at the people who organized the Jan. 6 rally. The purple team is looking at the extremist groups that stormed the Capitol. Their work will be published in an eight-chapter report to be released no later than Wednesday. The executive summary alone is expected to run 100 pages. The full report could run to 1,000 pages. Full transcripts will be released within 2 weeks. By putting everything on the website of the Government Publishing Office, the new Republican-controlled House won't be able to make it go away.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who led the first impeachment of Trump and was a prosecutor before he ran for Congress, yesterday said on CNN's "State of the Union": "Viewing it as a former prosecutor, I think there's sufficient evidence to charge the [former] president. If you look at Donald Trump's acts and you match them up against the statute, it's a pretty good match." But when pressed, he refused to say whether the Committee was going to recommend that Trump be indicted.
The legal impact of the report is zero. Special Counsel Jack Smith is already on the case. He doesn't need to be told what he is supposed to do. He knows that already. That said, the 1,000 pages of detail and thousands of transcripts could help him make his decisions. At the very least, it will save him a lot of work not having to reinterview people the Committee has already interviewed. All he has to do is read all the transcripts.
The political impact is something else again. This will be the biggest news story of the day, maybe the week, maybe the year. Even bigger than the World Cup final (congratulations, Argentina!). It will be hard to miss, even for people who are not tuned into politics. The main impact will not be on Trump's core supporters. He will call it fake news and they will all believe it. However, he has some supporters who haven't swallowed all the Kool-Aid. They just don't like Democrats. But if the coverage is damaging enough, some of them may decide they have had enough and start looking for a new hero, possibly Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL). Recent polls have shown that something like 37% of voters want Trump to run in 2024. If that were to drop to, say, 30%, it could hurt him badly. You don't generally win elections with 30% of the voters in your corner.
House Republicans know this is not going to be pretty. So they have produced their own 100+ page counter report. It is not known yet what will be in it, but it will be released this week. The authors are Republican Reps. Jim Jordan (OH), Jim Banks (IN), Rodney Davis (IL), Kelly Armstrong (ND), and Troy Nehls (TX). Conceivably it could try to say the Jan. 6 riot was no big deal and in any case, spontaneous and not carefully coordinated by Trump and his team. Who knows?
What is really important is how the right-wing media play the story. It is too big to hide under the bed. They will have to deal with it. They could attack it as being horribly biased (even though two of the panel members are conservative Republicans). They could attack the witnesses as being biased. But the report will have so much detail, that knocking a dozen witnesses as biased won't really change much. Some right-wing outlets are already wavering on Trump (see below). If more of them jump ship, that could be fatal to him. And if he is actually indicted and convicted, the trickle of deserters could become a flood. (V)