The Congressional January 6 Investigation Can Continue Into 2023 and Beyond—Even if Democrats Lose the House. Here’s How.

The House January 6 Committee just held its last public hearing in October, leaving years of evidence-gathering left to finish. Committee members imply politics leaves them no choice. They’re wrong.

ABOVE: The U.S. Capitol.

Introduction

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), a member of the House January 6 Committee, says of the historic special committee’s work that “there is a lot more information [about the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol] coming in [to the Committee] all the time.”

Indeed, the New York Times reports that there have been “10,000” calls to the House January 6 Committee’s tip-line since just this past June—a period only 130 days long.

Significant January 6 arrests continue to be made. Leading insurrectionists, such as sworn Oath Keeper Mark Finchem—a man who coordinated, on January 6, with fellow Oath Keepers who’ve since charged with Seditious Conspiracy—are now running for statewide offices in major part because the House January 6 Committee has yet to be able to spare their actions any attention. (Another example: Michigan Attorney General candidate Matt DePerno.)

The Committee has yet to decide whether to subpoena former vice president Mike Pence, though it did just subpoena Donald Trump—initiating a process that almost certainly will (if pursued by the Committee) require a lengthy federal court battle, a referral to DOJ for Contempt of Congress, and a federal indictment on that charge for it to amount to anything of significance. But no one realistically expects Trump to honor his subpoena, even just to repeatedly plead the Fifth Amendment on television.

The Committee continues to be stonewalled in court by some of its most important prospective witnesses, from former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows to former Trump lawyer John Eastman, from former Trump pick for United States Attorney General Jeffrey Clark to former top Trump adviser Steve Bannon, from Trump friend Roger Stone to yet another man (besides Stone) who Trump asked to lead the January 6 march on the U.S. Capitol, Alex Jones. As was infamously the case with the Mueller Report, most of the information the House January 6 Committee seeks is being kept from it by Trump allies who simultaneously say they have nothing to hide and risk imprisonment to avoid revealing what they know about the January 6 attack under oath. The full list of key January 6 witnesses the House January 6 Committee has yet to get full (or, in many cases, any) access to numbers in double digits, even as the laser focus of the House committee on Trump himself—to the exclusion of even leading co-conspirators like Ali Alexander—remains a function of a tight political calendar over which it has no control.

Some key witnesses, like Ginni Thomas, an insurrectionist plotter who’s the wife of current Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, have only just started cooperating, making it far too early for the House January 6 Committee to know or anticipate how its ongoing investigations could reveal whether what such witnesses have told them is true—or, alternatively, tellingly false. Other witnesses, such as Secret Service agents Anthony Ornato and Bobby Engel (the subject of many prior Proof reports, including here, here, here, and here) are apparently, on the basis of the hearing just held by the Committee, going to be recalled and interviewed again in the coming few weeks.

Since January of 2021, Proof—a publication read and cited by the House January 6 Committee—has explored dozens of lines of investigative inquiry that have borne substantial fruit but yet to be even mentioned in public congressional hearings. Even an insurrectionist leader as high up in the January 6 hierarchy as Alexander has only been mentioned a single time across nine House January 6 Committee hearings. Yet this exceeds the substantive mentions of the personal bodyguards of insurrectionists Michael Flynn, Patrick Byrne, and Sidney Powell during Insurrection Week—the 1st Amendment Praetorians, a group whose leaders through their Washington attorney have now stated their intention to plead the Fifth Amendment, a development that was barely reported by major media despite being one that normally would open up an entirely new front in the sprawling ongoing January 6 investigation writ large. In the event, this line of inquiry has thus far simply been ignored by the House January 6 Committee, whose subpoenas of 1AP leaders now wrongly appear merely gestural.

Despite all this, we’re told that the final public Committee hearing was just held on October 13. An investigation that is surely years away from completion is set to be hurriedly wrapped up as though it pertained not to the future of America—recall that Trump’s efforts to overthrow American democracy are very much ongoing, and set to expand considerably by 2024, poisoning the electoral processes of a dozen states rather than “merely” a single joint session of the United States Congress—but something as esoteric as the naming of a new post office. We can expect a lengthy final report, but little else, we’re told by media reports.

The notion that the January 6 investigation could be wrapped up by the end of 2022 in anything like a responsible way is, of course, a political fiction—an idea embraced, with a slight shrug by all concerned, because the current political realities seem to admit no other possibility. And that’s not because anyone acting in good faith in D.C. believes there aren’t years (plural) more investigation of January 6, 2021 to do. After all, leading polling websites tell us that as of October 12 there’s “only” a 29% chance the Democratic Party will continue to control Congress in 2023, and Republicans have already ensured the nation that if they’re returned to power they will immediately end the House January 6 Committee and launch precipitous impeachment proceedings against President Joe Biden. Given that it still must issue a comprehensive report on its findings—to include recommendations for how to ensure an event like January 6 will never happen again, recommendations sure to be quickly scuttled by any GOP-led House fronted by insurrection enabler and Donald Trump accomplice after-the-fact Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)—how (some ask) could the House January 6 Committee even hold hearings in November or December if such a report must be penned and issued before Christmas? The answer seems to be that there will be no such hearings.

It’s with all of this in mind that Committee chair Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) recently informed America that the October 13 Committee hearing would “likely” be the “final hearing” of Committee, though he and other members have since allowed that new hearings could be held if unexpected developments arise. Even this latter caveat, however, seems to improperly suggest that all the evidence the Committee has that would shock America to its core has either already been aired at prior hearings or will be aired on October 13. The veritable mountain of unreleased evidence and yet-unexplored investigative avenues catalogued at Proof confirms this premise as absurd.

But what if the congressional investigation of January 6 could continue beyond 2022?

The Situation on the Ground in Washington

One might presume that any proposal to extend the congressional investigation of January 6 into 2023 and beyond would depend on the rapidly changing odds that the Democratic Party will hold onto the U.S. House of Representatives. While the current aggregate of all available polls on this question shows (as noted above) merely a “29%” likelihood of this happening, we must recall that that figure—the product of dozens and dozens of polls and tens of thousands of computer simulations—sat at just “12%” on June 17, 2022; “12%” about a month later, on July 13, 2022; “17%” at the beginning of August; and was as low as “24%” at certain points this September. (The figure has since gotten as high as “32%”, on September 23 and 24 and between September 30 and October 2.)

In other words, while the Democrats are certainly not favored to take the House, their odds are generally looking up and—if it comes to pass that they continue to control the House—there’ll not only be no reason for the Committee to disband but no reason to issue anything more than (at most) an “interim” report in January 2023. That few doubt the continuation of the Committee would mean more public hearings in the future only underscores that no one really thinks the Committee is done with its work.

Indeed, consider what just the last four months of Committee work have produced.

Former Trump chief of staff Mick Mulvaney testified before the House January 6 Committee on Thursday, July 28; a few days earlier, the Committee had interviewed former Trump Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. By early August, negotiations were well underway to secure testimony before the Committee by former Trump Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe and former Trump Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Late July also saw the former chief of staff to Mike Pence, Marc Short, testify under a Department of Justice subpoena issued by a grand jury investigating the events of January 6; Pence’s former chief counsel Greg Jacob did the same at the same time. More recently, the Committee spoke to Ginni Thomas for over four hours and entered into negotiations to interview Trump adviser Newt Gingrich with (apparently) some real hope that this interview could come to pass eventually. The Committee also seeks testimony from Trump surrogate and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano; while it may not get Mastriano’s testimony before the November 8, 2022 midterm elections, it seems possible that it could get it afterward—especially if Mastriano loses, as he is currently projected to (and by a pretty fair margin, at that).

Moreover, this summer finally saw increased cooperation between the House January 6 Committee and the Department of Justice, meaning that as DOJ begins asking witnesses about Trump’s conduct on and before January 6 there’s the possibility that backchannel communication between the two entities—or even public reporting on the DOJ investigation—could open up or encourage new lines of inquiry for Congress.

Certainly we have ample evidence that the lines of influence have already run in the other direction, with countless major-media reports indicating that DOJ had a fire lit under it by the revelations from hearings the Committee held this past June and July.

In fact, this may well be that one reason the Republican Party wants to see the House January 6 Committee disbanded: it appears that thus far that the Committee has been the best investigative resource DOJ has. If the Committee is shuttered, it could slow the progress of the DOJ’s ongoing January 6 investigations to a crawl while depriving it of countless witness transcripts it might otherwise have acquired in the weeks and months ahead (e.g., transcripts of those who federal courts might order to testify before Congress in the future; transcripts of those who the House is able to negotiate testimony with; and transcripts of those witnesses the House discovers by dint of its intermittent focus on insurrectionist leaders, contrary to the divided attentions of FBI investigators and DOJ prosecutors, who are particularly invested in investigating, indicting, and prosecuting 1,000+ rank-and-file January 6 insurrectionists right now).

Even if we merely limit ourselves to information already held by the House January 6 Committee, we can see that the Committee has—in fairness, by its own admission—only released a small percentage of what it has that’s worth seeing and hearing. In June and July of this year, the House select committee periodically released, both outside and during its formal hearings, damning new deposition videos, such as this one from former Trump Secretary of Defense Chris Miller. The Miller deposition video revealed that—as had long been suspected, despite widely publicized claims by Trump and top allies like Kash Patel and Sean Hannity—the ex-president never asked the Pentagon to send troops to the U.S. Capitol either before or on January 6, 2021.

We also now know that the volume of improperly destroyed evidence in the January 6 investigation is staggering, and that the inspectors general tasked with recovering the evidence that they or their departments improperly allowed to be destroyed have done precious little to advance that aim. Investigating the destruction of evidence at the Pentagon and inside the United States Secret Service could have the secondary effect of revealing post-January 6 crimes by individuals who were also involved in conspiring with Donald Trump and his inner circle prior to January 6. This means that having the House January 6 Committee persist into 2023, as efforts are made to retrieve deleted text messages and electronic communications from men we know for certain were in regular contact with Donald Trump and his co-conspirators, is absolutely essential.

All in all, both the congressional and federal criminal investigations of the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol appear to be proceeding apace. While major media outlets regularly imply that the House January 6 Committee is losing steam—and public attention—this is to be expected with a renewed focus on COVID-19 variants, the war in Europe, the midterm elections, and ever-growing fears of a major recession. If the public is slightly less focused on January 2021 in October 2022 than it was in July 2022, this is largely a function of other historic news crowding it out and, to a lesser degree, an acknowledgment that the public will not fully appreciate the fact that the Trumpist insurrection launched on January 6 continues to the present day until the 2024 general election cycle begins. At that point, if not sooner, Americans will understand January 6 as merely a dress rehearsal, and those still untouched by the January 6 investigation—think Ginni Thomas friend Cleta Mitchell, or the aforementioned Roger Stone—as very well-prepared to continue or even expand their subversive conduct going forward.

It must be noted here, too, that the Democrats never believed that their investigation of January 6 would move votes in their direction. As Politico and others have reported, Democrats have focused on making a historical record of what happened on and before January 6—both as a foundation upon which to build future recommendations for evolving our electoral infrastructure and as a way to ensure that future generations never forget the evil done in Donald Trump’s name and with his active assistance. The need for a House January 6 Committee therefore doesn’t lapse with Election Day 2022 or even Election Day 2024, not only because the Trumpist insurrection is very likely to survive those dates but because American history is being written in real time right now.

So if, when the 118th Congress is formally seated on January 3, 2023, the House January 6 Committee is summarily disbanded, the loss to America will be incalculable.

What America Looks Like Post-HJ6C: Ten Dire Facts

Proof asks not just its readers but also those members of the House January 6 Committee who may be reading this report to take a deep look into the near-term future of America, in which all of the following events are nearly certain to occur:

(1) Donald Trump will be running for President of the United States with a much larger and more consistent platform to spread lies about January 6 and undermine the work of the Committee than he has ever had. We’ve already seen how U.S. media covers Trump when he’s running for the presidency, and we’ve no indication yet that things will be different in 2023 or 2024 than they were in 2016 or 2020: Trump will be on the television screens of America almost every day spreading lies about his own past conduct, and they will be too many in number and too broad in scope and too frequent in repetition for the media to properly combat them. The former president has already made clear that his personal grievances over the 2020 election will be the centerpiece of his prospective 2024 presidential run—even if many Republicans, in and out of Washington, could wish it otherwise—which means wall-to-wall lies about what he calls “the coup” (the November 2020 presidential election, which he lost in a popular-vote and Electoral College landslide) and January 6, which he refers to as a peaceful and patriotic protest whose apparent sinister components were all, as he tells is, pre-arranged by the Democratic Party, the FBI, antifa, members of Black Lives Matter, George Soros, and a shadowy six-nation cabal that includes China and Iran.

But worse still than these lies will be the fact that they’ll be issued to a nation without an active congressional investigation of January 6.

(2) The GOP-led House of Representatives will be running sham January 6 hearings intended exclusively to bolster Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, attack the Democratic Party, and spread lies about the January 6 attack. We well know, from watching the Republicans’ Benghazi Committee operate for two and a half years without any notable findings, that the House GOP Caucus is comfortable using a House select committee to spread politically motivated lies, and to do so across dozens and dozens of public hearings that use misstatements, misdirections, rumors, innuendo, gossip, outright lies, and junk interim reports to slander and libel their political enemies. If the House January 6 Committee will have conducted, by the time of its likely January 2023 dissolution, approximately ten hearings in total, the new “House January 6 Committee” (as Republicans may even keep the name to confuse voters) will hold twice that number of hearings or more and feature wild tales about Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) single-handedly failing to secure the Capitol on January 6 (this video notwithstanding), antifa and BLM activists working with the FBI to spark a “government MIHOP” (“Government Made It Happen on Purpose”) or “government LIHOP” (“Government Let It Happen on Purpose”) riot on Capitol grounds, a presidential election stolen by rampant if coincidentally wholly unproven voter fraud and “Democrat Party [sic]” chicanery, and, above all of this, a courageous and honorable then-president of the United States who—mirabile dictu!—happens to be, at the time this disinformation is being systematically disseminated, the prohibitive favorite to be the 2024 GOP nominee for president. By mid-2023, all the hard work of the House January 6 Committee will be a distant memory, replaced by either widespread confusion and disaffection among American voters about what really happened on January 6 or—at worst—a new narrative about that day that flies in the face of all the facts but is in any case the one most Americans believe simply because it’s the one they’ve heard the most and most recently.

(3) There will be impeachment hearings against President Joe Biden. The GOP will not stop at a sham January 6 committee intended to bolster Donald Trump’s chances of re-election in 2024. It will initiate impeachment proceedings against Trump’s likely 2024 Democratic opponent, President Joe Biden, to complete the most dastardly pincer maneuver in the history of American politics: at once covering up the seditious and possibly treasonous conduct of their own presidential nominee while misusing the constitutional impeachment process to heap slander and libel and accusations of treachery upon that nominee’s opponent. Nor is this merely a worst-case scenario; Republicans have already made clear that a highly public impeachment investigation into Biden and his family is a certainty, with the only question left being whether it eventually blossoms into actual articles of impeachment (and certainly it need not do so to maintain a permanent cloud over the Biden administration). That Republicans have already written up such articles in lieu of having conducted such an investigation certainly doesn’t augur well. Saddest of all, Americans feeling pain at the pump and the grocery store will have voted for this immoral and unethical partisan circus under the impression that what they’d be getting from a Republican majority in the House is lower gas and food prices, a reversal of inflationary trends, and action on domestic priorities like healthcare and infrastructure. What they will get instead is the 2024 Trump presidential campaign in the form of an ostensibly patriotic governing body.

The foreign-policy action likely to be the centerpiece of any such impeachment probe and/or articles—Biden’s decision to authorize a full withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan—is, it turns out, precisely the action Trump himself signed in December 2020 before reversing his decision (see the 2022 book Proof of Coup: How the Pentagon Shaped An Insurrection for more). That’s right: with Trump’s full-throated support, Republicans will seek to impeach Trump’s likely 2024 opponent for an action Trump himself authorized, not that this colossal irony is likely to be registered by Republican voters or even any befuddled independent voters the United States somehow has left.

(4) New January 6 evidence will be uncovered—and then immediately buried. As we have seen over the last few months, the volume of January 6 evidence yet to be found is staggering in its breadth and depth. Consider, for instance, the revelation that not only were potentially critical U.S. Secret Service texts from Insurrection Eve and Insurrection Day deliberately destroyed after four separate federal demands that these records be preserved as required by law, but also the fact that the Trump-appointed Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, Joseph V. Cuffari, appears to have taken a series of actions over the last year intended to aid and abet a massive cover-up—including inexplicably putting a halt to all attempts inside the Secret Service to recover the destroyed evidence and interview agents about why such key evidence was eradicated in the first place. Cuffari has a history of seeking to protect Trump rather than America, and if (contrary to the demands of Bennie Thompson of the House January 6 Committee and New York Rep. Carolyn Maloney of the House Oversight Committee) Cuffari stays in charge of the January 6 investigation inside DHS, it’s clear that America won’t have an answer on these missing texts until long after the House January 6 Committee has been disbanded. Certainly, what few texts have been preserved from Trump’s apparently corrupt Secret Service—some of which were revealed at the last Committee hearing—were both harrowing and damning.

Meanwhile, at least one of the Secret Service agents who is believed to have evidence relevant to the January 6 investigation, the still-unnamed presidential SUV driver for Trump on January 6, has now retained G. Zachary Terwilliger, son of the attorney for Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, as his private legal counsel—underscoring that, like former Trump detail head Tony Ornato, he too may plan on putting Trump’s interests ahead of America’s. (This continues the years-long trend of those who could harm Trump with their testimony somehow ending up with an attorney Trump would approve of). In the absence of a House January 6 Committee committed to learning the truth about January 6, there will be no ongoing effort to locate new evidence about January 6 or to do anything with evidence that may serendipitously emerge. Witnesses who right now are coming forward voluntarily with testimony and material evidence will not do so if there’s no one to whom they can deliver such testimony or evidence, and by the same token, witnesses who are wavering about giving testimony (like some others in the Secret Service who once promised to give it) will have no more pressure applied to them once the House January 6 Committee—the real one, that is—is gone.

(5) A ramped-up DOJ investigation will produce new revelations—most of which will be instantly buried by both the 24-hour news cycle and the Republicans’ sham January 6 committee. We’ve already seen, this summer, how a high-quality oversight probe in the United States Congress can spur action inside DOJ. Attorney General Merrick Garland has said that both he and his top prosecutors have been watching the House January 6 Committee hearings with interest, and indeed the deconfliction and evidence-sharing processes involving Congress and DOJ—often contentious, it’s true, but certainly not fruitless—have been sufficiently public for it to be clear that the two entities are at least in contact with one another and working to see how and when they can cooperate.

What we tend to forget is that this sort of cooperation is of mutual benefit. While for now it appears that Congress is well ahead of DOJ in investigating the January 6 coup plotters, recent news on the Department ramping up that side of its ongoing January 6 investigation suggests that, right at the point at which the House January 6 Committee no longer exists, there may be revelations emanating from DOJ actions (subpoenas, raids, interrogations, interviews, grand jury testimony, and perhaps even indictments) that could encourage new avenues of inquiry in a congressional oversight probe. But if there’s no House January 6 Committee, there’ll be no one in Congress ready to receive and synthesize such aid or information.

Consider, for instance, the recent second DOJ warrant to search Trump lawyer John Eastman’s phone. Can there be any doubt that at some point there’ll be information from a DOJ indictment of Eastman (or others) that Congress will want to synthesize as it attempts to draft new legislation to prevent a recurrence of the events of January 6? And what about the new information just now being uncovered by journalists that reveals potentially criminal actions by Trump acolytes who haven’t yet been spoken to by Congress?

Just so, and as discussed more here and in Proof of Coup, we are slowly learning that some of the pre-January 6 federal intelligence-gathering failures may well have been both (a) deliberate, and (b) politically motivated. If this is so, a U.S. House led by allies of the man for whom this shoddy intelligence-gathering may have been covering for—Trump—is hardly the appropriate body to investigate such failures of intelligence, even if the House GOP caucus currently claims that it wishes to focus future oversight attention on why the Capitol was under-resourced on January 6. If past is precedent, the moment an inquiry of this sort shines a light on possible systemic pro-Trump bias at the highest levels of the FBI, the light will be turned off—and what it has revealed will be lied about relentlessly by leading Trumpists and their enablers in the media.

(6) Because the House January 6 Committee has no counterpart in the U.S. Senate, its final-report recommendations will likely die there. Americans may have felt a spark of optimism upon hearing the announcement that a bipartisan groups of U.S. senators has been working on fixes—candidly, extremely tepid ones—to some of the blind spots in congressional legislation that may have further emboldened the coup plotters who orchestrated the events of January 6 (and who candidly, did not much need emboldening or pay much heed to existing legislation or precedent), but the fact remains that when the House January 6 Committee issues its final report in December 2022 or very early January 2023 (a) that bipartisan group of senators will no longer be working on election-law reforms, and in any case (b) any House January 6 Committee recommendations will be strident at a level the aforementioned bipartisan working group—having no first-hand experience with investigating the horrifying facts behind January 6—are unlikely to condone. If the House select committee’s recommendations are to go anywhere after the Committee is disbanded, which itself is questionable if the Republicans have taken over the House, it’ll require an active and engaged working group in the Senate that has likewise been tasked with issuing such recommendations.

We should keep in mind here that House and Senate members are accustomed to the reconciliation process, in which differences between a House-passed bill and a Senate-approved version of it are hammered out. While this process necessarily requires the involvement of duly constituted committee members in both chambers of Congress, nothing precludes members of the Senate from directly engaging with members of the minority in the House if those minority members are subject-matter experts. While neither of the two Republican members of the bipartisan House January 6 Committee will be in the next Congress—Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) is retiring and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) lost her primary to an insurrectionist backed by Trump—it is beyond dispute that the Democratic members of the Committee could work with a bipartisan group of senators to ensure that the latter understand the work the former have done.

Indeed, given that the House January 6 Committee has already set the precedent of hiring a former representative of the minority party—ex-House member Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA)—as a top adviser, were the U.S. Senate to launch a Democrat-only or bipartisan-but-Democrat-led January 6 Committee it could immediately diversify its political demographics by hiring two former House Republicans already known to be experts on January 6: former representatives Kinzinger and Cheney. What better way for the latter, in particular, to remain in the political limelight as she considers running against Trump for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination than for her to be the top Republican aide to a reconstituted January 6 investigation in the Senate?

(7) Certain January 6 investigative maneuvers will not become “ripe” until after the House January 6 Committee has been disbanded. Consider the public offer to testify before the House January 6 Committee made by Steve Bannon, whose upcoming federal jail sentence, likely to begin in 2023, might not terminate his responsibility to comply with his current (or a new) federal subpoena, given that he has publicly indicated his willingness to do so. This willingness admittedly may well have been performative—intended to impress his sentencing judge but no one else—but it also might justify Congress issuing a new subpoena that relies on his own representations of an evolving willingness to testify.

If the House January 6 Committee is gone in January 2023, however, it will be before a sham Republican committee that Bannon testifies, if he testifies at all. Bannon has already, as the far-right digital rag The Epoch Times writes, called for Republicans in the House to launch a vengeful operation starting in 2023 aimed at giving him and other Trumpist January 6 co-conspirators the time, space, and television time to spread lies about Trump and January 6 with impunity. Indeed, those witnesses with whom the Committee is now or will soon be in litigation with over past or current subpoenas—for instance, Alex Jones—may be finally forced to come to Congress’ witness table only after that table has been taken over by the GOP and transformed into a grand stage for a well-orchestrated political farce. If, that is, Republicans don’t quickly withdraw from any federal litigation that doesn’t also feature DOJ as a party.

{Note: In theory, any GOP-constituted House January 6 Committee launched in 2023 would have members of both parties, enabling House Democrats—even in the minority—to question any prospective 2023 witnesses, such as Bannon. But this may give Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and his prospective newly formed House majority too much credit; it would be all too easy for McCarthy and his fellow insurrectionists to trade on the bad credit of their own lies about the bipartisan [2021-2022] House January Committee by claiming the right to make their new House select committee “Republican-only” to “balance out” the work done by two Republicans and seven Democrats in the current Congress. At most, they might appoint some former Democrats, like Trump sycophant Jeff van Drew (R-NJ), on the false claim that this is the equivalent of Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats appointing three Trumpist Republicans to the current House January 6 Committee and then, when all three withdrew on Trump’s orders, replacing them with two conservative Republicans who don’t happen to enjoy Trump’s favor.}

(8) If the House January 6 Committee has been disbanded by January 2023, it means Republicans have taken over the House, and if the GOP has the House in 2023 and 2024 it may be impossible to preclude Trump from the 2024 GOP presidential nomination—or more specifically, from appearing on the 2024 presidential ballots in all fifty states and D.C.—through Congressional legislation regarding Americans who foment insurrection. Those who have watched the House January 6 Committee closely have long observed that it’s eschewed any sustained focused on anyone but Donald Trump. While at times various Trump co-conspirators have been mentioned in Committee testimony or presentations, there can be no doubt that the main thrust of the Committee’s work has been to establish that Trump is an insurrectionist—and therefore, presumably, ineligible to run for federal office again under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.

While Free Speech for People, led by the efforts of attorney John Bonifaz, is now working to disqualify Trump from 2024 state ballots on a state-by-state basis, this effort would be considerably aided by some sort of action by Congress—whether it be a formal censure, a Contempt of Congress referral, or even something as obtuse as a “Sense of the Senate” resolution. While it is unlikely any of these methods would in themselves resolve the issue in every (or perhaps even any) state, if conjoined with a prosecution of Trump for election fraud in Georgia these actions could combine to convince one or more battleground-state judges to preclude Trump from that state’s 2024 ballot (though whether this would hold up under an appeal to the United States Supreme Court is less clear, its recent frostiness toward Trump notwithstanding).

In short, there are actions House Democrats could take to wound Trump’s prospective 2024 presidential candidacy—which would, in being in essence a bid to turn America into a totalitarian state without regular elections, pose an existential threat to the U.S.—that could only be taken by the Senate, instead, if Democrats don’t retain the House after the 2022 national elections.

(9) Given that it is now universally agreed that the existence of the House January 6 Committee has furthered and even hastened the Department of Justice January 6 investigation, not only by providing it with new information and leads but by paving the way for its expansion, the lack of a House January 6 Committee could materially hinder any potential DOJ prosecution of Trump over January 6. Already we hear whispers that DOJ wishes to focus on its slam-dunk case against Trump for stealing classified documents from the White House rather than its facially more attenuated (but in actuality more important and just as well-founded) case against Trump over January 6. But of course the former case can’t (except in the unlikely event it’s charged as Espionage) preclude Trump from running for the White House again under the Fourteenth Amendment, so the Mar-a-Lago case is a means to protect the nation from Trump only if—as seems unlikely—he receives not just a conviction but a prison sentence lengthy enough to keep him out of the 2024 election cycle entirely.

That the DOJ investigation of Trump has thus far been tardy and inexplicably hesitant has been confirmed many times over, most recently by the discovery that DOJ hadn’t even thought to speak to former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson at the time the House January 6 Committee made her a star witness at one of its summer hearings.

Hutchinson’s testimony against Trump was the most damning of any House January 6 Committee hearing—which is saying something—making it profoundly concerning that she wasn’t even on DOJ’s radar. This suggests that if the Committee is indeed disbanded in early January 2023, there may well be other critical eyewitnesses to the events of January 6 who would have been found and then brought forward by the House (and thereafter taken note of by DOJ) who now will neither be located by Congress nor subpoenaed for testimony by DOJ. And that thought is a terrifying one.

(10) A Republican House will instantly quash every House January 6 Committee subpoena, resign from every pending January 6 case, and publish unfiltered reports in which the leading January 6 conspirators are allowed to lie about their conduct with impunity because they are not under oath and now have no belief they will be.

All this goes without saying, and yet it must be said.

If a comparatively minor incident like the Benghazi embassy attack warranted, in the view of the Republican Party, well over two years of aggressive investigation, one imagines that if (say) then-president Barack Obama had lost the 2012 presidential election and thereafter coordinated a coup to seize control of the government and end American democracy, punctuating his plot with a domestic-terror attack on Republican legislators by heavily armed Black Lives Matter advocates, anti-fascist protesters, LGBTQIA+ “radicals”, and members of the Communist Party, such an event would be under Republican Party investigative scrutiny for upwards of a full decade. Yet here we are, with the House January 6 Committee furiously trying to wrap up its work in well under 24 months—knowing that any litigation that remains pending by the end of 2022 (and given the pace of federal litigation, nearly all legal maneuvers are guaranteed to surpass 24 months in duration) will be dashed to pieces by their Republican successors.

Needless to say, even the mere foreknowledge of this potential future has conspicuously degraded the January 6 Committee’s work. Would Ginni Thomas has been interviewed (not under oath) for four hours, or instead interrogated under oath for twelve hours, if the Committee had known in advance it would have all the time it needed to enforce a subpoena of Thomas? Would Bannon, Meadows, Jones, Alexander, and so many others—including more ancillary Trumpworld figures that we hear far less about, like the leaders of the 1st Amendment Praetorians—have been able to (variously) forestall, evade, or otherwise curtail their congressional testimony if the Committee whose questions they sought to avoid was held to be impervious to a neat and sudden demise in the months or even years ahead?

The truth is that we can’t know what the House January 6 Committee investigation—historically damning as it was—would have looked like without the cloud of the future Republican takeover of the House it was under from its launch in mid-2021. Certainly, it would’ve been less single-mindedly focused on Donald Trump, and would had the benefit of additional coherence a more comprehensive focus would have made possible.

The Way Forward Now

The above are just ten components of the very dark future America faces if and when the Republican Party—now rather unambiguously a front for an ongoing insurrection—takes control of Congress. But is anyone in the House, in the Senate, or outside D.C. really thinking much about this future? In all the planning both major political parties are doing for the 2022 national elections, is there any room for advance planning to prepare for the likeliest outcome of those elections in the House: a new GOP majority?

While no one realistically expects politicians to look beyond an upcoming election, we do expect it of journalists. As a longtime university journalism professor, I’ve always said that we can’t let the 24-hour news cycle so narrow our focus to the present and recent past that we lose sight of journalism’s equal responsibility to illuminate, as and when it can, the near future. While House Democrats may already be planning for the statistical likelihood of a disbanded House January 6 Committee by literally doing and saying nothing that indicates they’ve even imagined a January 6 investigation by the U.S. Congress extending into 2023 and 2024, this neither justifies their tunnel vision nor explains why Americans journalists already appear to have adopted it wholesale.

Consider the following brief anecdote: during post-hearing cable news coverage of the last jaw-dropping televised hearing of the House January 6 Committee in the summer of 2022, Kasie Hunt of CNN—ordinarily a fine journalist—made a stunning admission that reveals one of the gravest and most persistent issues with major-media coverage of January 6. Said Hunt, “I don’t think anyone here [at CNN] expected these hearings to be still going in July, let alone that there’d be more in September.” {Note: It turned out that, due to Hurricane Ian, the next Committee hearing wouldn’t be held until October.}

Hunt’s statement was stunning because no one who has seriously researched January 6, Proof included, had much doubt that there’d be more House January 6 Committee hearings after the hearings of June 2022. Why? Because January 6 researchers fully understand how complex the January 6 fact-pattern is—and how little of it we have heard thus far in Congressional hearings, despite how startling and harrowing they’ve been at every turn. And yet, somehow, key major-media figures seem not to grok this.

Certainly, there have been signs of life in major-media coverage of January 6, such as the New York Times Visual Investigations Unit partnering with an anonymous indie collective of digital researchers, the #SeditionHunters—a group with which Proof has no association—to offer readers a detailed, almost U.S. Army War College-like view of the individual battles that made up an hours-long war at the United States Capitol on January 6. And anchors like Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper on CNN, or Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, have laid bare, unambiguously, the threat to democracy that was posed by Trump and his aides, agents, advisers, attorneys, allies, associates and acolytes on Insurrection Day. While there’s much less cohesive coverage of the ongoing threat Team Trump poses (with the media covering events like Trump calling the head of the Wisconsin Assembly to try to coerce him to “decertify” Biden’s 2020 win in that state as though this was a one-off misdeed not part of an ongoing and very active insurrection), U.S. media is certainly still keeping tabs on what Trump has been up to—perhaps in part because it’s now confirmed that he’ll be running again.

{Note: Robin Vos, Speaker of the Wisconsin Assembly, has now arguably become a scofflaw and insurrectionist enabler by refusing to testify before the House January 6 Committee.}

Does media really understand how close we came to losing our democracy after the 2020 presidential election? It appears the answer is “no”—as if it did, there’ be no thought whatsoever in media that the House January 6 Committee could’ve wrapped up its investigation in early Summer 2022. Indeed, media’s lack of understanding of a simple fact—that January 6 will be studied for generations, and that it could easily be investigated for seven or even ten years without any such investigation flagging or indulging trivial lines of inquiry—has become dangerous, inasmuch as it’s created an implicit push from high-profile media quarters for the House January 6 Committee to wrap up its historically important work soon. No less august a publication than the New York Times reported three days ago that the Committee had just “wrapped up its case”; in fact, as this Proof report has detailed, the Committee’s case is nowhere close to complete, and what it has “wrapped up” is no more or less than the sliver of time our political calendar and the capriciousness of U.S. voters has allotted it.

For any journalist to say that the prospective forced disbanding of a committee that Watergate superstar journalist Carl Bernstein calls one of the three most historically important committees of our age is a “wrapping up” of a case that’s been conclusively submitted borders on journalistic malpractice.

So while the House January 6 Committee still has 77 days of work it can do as of this writing—to include, if it wishes, many more hearings, interviews, subpoenas, public statements, court arguments, and archival dumps of critically important evidence—there seems to be a sense that the only thing we’re now waiting on is the Committee’s final report, one which will invariably (as did the Mueller Report) have to recite early on just how little of the evidence it sought to accumulate it got. That is, just as Robert Mueller did, the Committee will have to note that it was lied to and stonewalled; that evidence it requested was instead illegally destroyed; and that countless Trumpists who claimed to have done nothing wrong nevertheless fought tooth and nail not to answer even the most basic questions about their conduct—to include a leading suspect who daily opines on how innocent he is, Donald Trump, refusing to so much as provide his name to Congress under oath.

So here’s the question this article asks: must this be so? Is there a way for the January 6 investigation to live on past January 2023, no matter who controls the U.S. House?

It turns out the answer is “yes.”

From Document Preservation to Bicameral Transition

You may have noticed that at the start of every House January 6 Committee hearing there has been a public statement about the future release of witness transcripts. You certainly are aware that the Committee will in December or very early January be releasing an exhaustive final report which, Committee members have repeatedly said, will include a veritable mountain of incriminating evidence that did not make it into the Committee’s comparatively few nationally televised hearings. And as noted above, the Committee’s avid evidence-gathering has been conjoined, behind the scenes, with coordination (if intermittent and not always fully collegial) with the DOJ, yet another confirmation that the Committee intends to release, in some form or another, before it dissipates in a cloud of smoke consequent to circumstances not of its own making, just about everything it’s ever compiled. And it’s willing to undertake this important task not only across government branches but also with respect to the general public.

In short, the Committee wants all of us to see everything.

This stands in stark contrast to the federal Russia and Ukraine investigations of the late 2010s and early 2020s, which were undertaken during the Trump presidency and in both cases encompassed an enormous stock of purported national security–related intelligence that was hidden from the American people—which remains invisible to us still today, even has Donald Trump confirms he’ll again be seeking the presidency.

If the House January 6 Committee believes its work is of historic importance, as it clearly does; if it acknowledges that it has not just much more evidence to reveal but also much more evidence to uncover, as it clearly does; if the Democratic Party has already resigned itself to the events of January 6 (and the ongoing insurrection it birthed) continuing to be a pressing political issue well beyond the 2022 elections, as it clearly has and must, given Trump’s insistence on this being so through his words and deeds; if we know, as we certainly do, that the Committee is willing to share its work with basically anyone who can do anything valuable with it, is there any reason for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) not to constitute a Senate January 6 Committee on January 3rd, 2023, assuming the Democrats manage to hold onto the United States Senate—as they’re presently favored, by a decent margin, to do?

Quite apart from the obvious and already exhaustively discussed necessity for such a Committee, and quite apart from the historical fact that a bicameral investigation is precisely what we got during the Trump-Russia scandal and therefore should only be what American voters expect with respect to a somehow even more harrowing and encompassing scandal, could it not substantially motivate Democratic voters as they head to the polls on November 8 if they know that ensuring continued Democratic party control of at least one house of Congress also ensures that January 6 will remain under investigation rather than swept under the rug? For that matter, surely there are many independent voters who at least want January 6 to be comprehensively inquired after by individuals other than those who aided and abetted it—i.e., conspirators like McCarthy, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ), Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA)?

Not only would it not be difficult at all for the House January 6 Committee to transmit all its evidence to a Senate select committee formed this December, just as the House select committee is disbanding—assuming Democrats hold the Senate but lose the House—but House members certainly could and would make themselves available on a volunteer basis to assist with such an intra-branch bicameral investigative transition.

So what sort of obstacles actually exist to the formation of such a select committee?

There aren’t as many as you’d think, but let’s take a look at those we already know of.

The Logistics of a Senate January 6 Committee

Certainly, prospective 2023 Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) would at first object to any such select committee being formed, despite the fact that he has not spoken to Donald Trump for years, has no love for the man whatsoever, and in fact would only benefit—as arguably would his entire political party—if events unfolded in such a way as to preclude Trump from running for office in 2024. (While any Senate January 6 Committee could dredge up new misconduct by House GOP members, if the Republican Party gets to 235+ House seats in 2023, as current projections seem to imply they may, even the expulsion from Congress of a tiny number of insurrectionist Republicans—who would quickly be replaced by equally conservative Republicans less loyal to Trump and more loyal to McConnell—wouldn’t alter Republican hegemony in the House.)

One reason Sen. McConnell would object is that he would have no obvious fallback position. While it is critical to note here that Senate Republicans initially seriously considered a bicameral, bipartisan January 6 committee back in 2021—making it less far-fetched that they’d return to the idea, even if we should still deem it unlikely—clearly if Trumpist insurrectionists have taken over the U.S. House of Representatives by 2023 there’s no chance of a bicameral anything and even less odds of a nonpartisan, non-congressional commission (as this would be wholly outside the control of both the Republicans and the Democrats, no issue for the latter but a grave one for the former).

But if McConnell is a Senate Minority Leader rather than a Senate Majority Leader on January 3, 2023, his objection to a Senate select committee is essentially meaningless—not just to the Democrats’ plans, but even to his own political interests in making sure that he doesn’t repeat Kevin McCarthy’s mistake of accidentally ensuring there’ll be no “loyal”Republicans on such a committee.

That is, just like McCarthy did in 2021, McConnell would likely first attempt to place on any Democratic-launched Senate January 6 Committee at least a few senators who are witnesses in the investigation: for instance, obvious malfeasors like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), and slightly less obvious GOP malfeasors like those senators who spoke to Trump or Giuliani or their respective teams on or shortly before Insurrection Week (e.g., Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa or Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri). Of course, Schumer would likely exclude from participation in the new select committee not just January 6 co-conspirators but even any senator who objected to the 2020 presidential election results being certified (as such objections were clearly made in bad faith, in the absence of any evidence of systemic voter fraud).

Schumer would’ve learned from Speaker Pelosi’s experience trying to set up a House January 6 committee that he can reject such nefarious additions to a select committee on principled grounds—namely, the idea that you don’t put witnesses to a crime on a committee investigating that crime.

So what would (or could) McConnell do then? Presumably, he would be left with the same options McCarthy faced in 2021: (a) boycott the committee entirely, or (b) accept that no one will end up on the committee without Schumer’s say-so. McCarthy made the former decision, and not only has he regretted it ever since, but so has the ex-president whose actions launched the January 6 attack. This makes it far more likely that McConnell would try to find four (or depending on the size of the committee, as many as five or six) Republican senators willing to join the committee and acceptable to Schumer and the Democrats.

{Note: If McConnell were to inexplicably make the same mistake McCarthy made and choose to boycott the Committee, it would not in any significant way inconvenience the Democrats. They would likely then issue open invitations to moderate senators like Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and a few others, with the hope that at least one of these would agree to participate. Certainly, any GOP senator who voted to impeach Trump in his second impeachment trial and is still in the U.S. Senate in 2023 would have at least some reason to consider serving on a committee that essentially extends the work of that trial while potentially offering a different outcome.}

Having said all this, McConnell certainly has a stronger hold on his caucus than does McCarthy on his. Presumably, McConnell could threaten his caucus into staying off a “Senate January 6 Committee” if he wanted to—a deliberate attempt to create an all-Democratic committee that McConnell and other elected Republicans in Washington would then spend the next year or two calling a partisan operation.

But again, this didn’t work out well for either Trump or Kevin McCarthy. While we might note that the reason McCarthy’s plan backfired was the unexpected emergence of two “rogue” anti-Trump GOP House members—Reps. Kinzinger and Cheney—an occurrence that might not be replicable given that while Mitt Romney is a principled conservative he is also essentially a party loyalist, one thing Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats did that Senate Democrats could emulate was choose Republicans as their investigators. Just as Riggleman was put on the House January 6 Committee staff (along with Republican lawyer John Wood, at the time he was becoming a prospective GOP Senate candidate from Missouri), ex–House members Kinzinger and Cheney could join the Senate January 6 Committee staff. Nor is there any shortage of Republican attorneys who’d be willing to join such an endeavor, perhaps to the point of being willing to oversee some of the live questioning a new Senate January 6 Committee would invariably conduct.

Select committees are an essential feature of both the House and Senate; what differs between these two bodies is their internal culture. It’s universally understood that by its nature and history, the Senate is a less partisan and contentious body than is the House, and this—coupled with the fact that Leader Schumer is infinitely less bold than Speaker Pelosi—could sway Schumer toward taking the easy route, with him urging the House to come to a clean conclusion of its January 6 investigation so his own body can maintain its longstanding veneer of comity.

But there are some problems with this route, and they’re big ones. They include:

(1) The Senate will have to deal with January 6 either way. Donald Trump is going to make the 2020 presidential election the centerpiece of his 2024 run. Would Schumer and McConnell rather have to answer questions on this topic piecemeal, or be able to defer all questions to a Senate January 6 Committee final report that would surely be in the works for months or even years?

(2) The Senate GOP caucus leadership may want Donald Trump gone as much as the Democrats do. It can’t be the case that former Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) is the only prominent Republican who thinks Trump can’t win in 2024. If McConnell (or, say, his co-deputy Sen. John Thune of South Dakota) can’t openly oppose Trump, they can at least contend that—because Democrats (in this scenario) control the Senate—they had no choice but to fully populate a Senate January 6 Committee with Republican members and then step aside to let those Republicans do their bipartisan work.

(3) The clamor among Democratic voters for Congress to act to make Donald Trump ineligible to run is only going to grow. We’re hearing nothing about this now because Trump hasn’t formally announced that he’s running. Once he does, Democratic voters and possibly some independent voters will consider the idea categorically unacceptable—demanding a congressional resolution that Schumer won’t be able to entertain if the deliberative body he leads hasn’t even tried to conduct its own January 6 investigation.

(4) New bombshells will drop, and sooner than many expect. The breadth and depth of investigative inquiries concerning January 6—many of which the House January 6 Committee has to this point left untouched—are underscored by the 200+ reports here at Proof. It is now almost inevitable that new bombshells about January 6 will drop in 2023 (or even in November or December of this year), making it obvious to all America that if the January 6 investigation in Congress isn’t continued in some way, this new evidence will not receive any congressional oversight. While it may be easy for Chuck Schumer to say right now that the Senate will not do as the House has done and create a select committee, it will be much harder if in 2023 the Democrats only control the Senate as stunning new evidence concerning January 6 emerges. Will Democratic voters permit a Democratic-controlled legislative body to sit idly by as a harrowingly insurrectionist GOP majority in the House gleefully ignores even the existence of evidentiary bombshells all America is speaking of around the nation’s water coolers?

(5) The more the insurrectionists prospectively controlling the House do to aid and abet not just the January 6 insurrection after the fact but Trump’s renewed political ambitions, the more unacceptable months and months of inaction by the Senate’s Democrats will be. A demoralized Democratic Party won’t come out to vote in 2024, and if Republicans in the House are conducting a sham impeachment and sham probe into Democrats’ actions on January 6 even as new January 6 bombshells are emerging and new DOJ indictments related to January 6 are appearing, it will shortly become untenable for Senate Democrats to take no action to pick up their House peers’ mantle.

But in addition to all this, we must remember three other items of significant import:

(6) Court cases seeking to vindicate Congress’ authority to subpoena witnesses may extend beyond January 2, 2023 in some form or another. This will make it impossible for the Democratic Party to remain aloof from efforts to ensure that Congress’ constitutionally granted oversight powers continue to be respected and enforced.

(7) The Trump 2024 presidential campaign and House Republicans will work in tandem to spread disinformation about about the 2020 election. As long as this cycle of deceit continues—and surely it will not only continue but begin to swirl even more furiously in 2023 and 2024—Democrats will need to have a response, and a 2022 report that is long and was likely read by almost no one won’t cut it. There will, one way or another, need to be a countervailing entity controlled or at least equally participated in by Democrats that’s unapologetically facts-forward, whether or not it’s bipartisan.

(8) The House may propose election-related legislation that the Senate will have to take up anyway. While a GOP takeover of the House in January 2023 could scuttle any vote on recommendations issuing from the House January 6 Committee—even if the Committee generates Democrat-sponsored initiatives that are broadly “severable”, meaning that the GOP could find a procedural means to vote on some but not all of them—there remains a possibility that, whether in December or in 2023 by as-yet unforeseen means, election-related legislation will have to be taken up by both the House and Senate. Would the Senate not wish, in this context, to have conducted its own January 6 investigation and thereby come to its own pre-reconciliation proposals?

(9) There’s already a bipartisan Senate working group addressing election issues. The discussion above may inadvertently make it sound like the obstacles to a bipartisan Senate January 6 Committee are insurmountable—but in fact the present existence of a bipartisan Senate working group seeking to close the alleged statutory loopholes that made January 6 possible (particularly as to the Electoral Count Act of 1887) belies that premise. While the current Senate working group is not officially a fact-finding operation, if it ever intends on entering into a reconciliation process with negotiators from the House it will on some level have to be. How can the Senate back its own vision of how to avoid another January 6 if it is working from (beyond a House document) the Senate transcript of the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump?

The January 6 investigation has moved so far beyond what was known in February 2021—and indeed will in short order move so far beyond what is presently known to the House January 6 Committee in October 2022—that the current Senate working group may have to turn to some hard conversations about what facts it does and does not accept, and what facts it can and cannot consider in proposing new legislation to congressional peers and U.S. voters.

(10) Democrats could retain the House. There has been an assumption, so far in this article, that the case for a Senate January 6 Committee can only be made if the House enters Republicans’ hands in January 2023. But is this so? If the Democrats retain the House, the December 2020 HJ6C report will become merely an “interim” report; all extant House subpoenas involving January 6 will be litigated; the House will continue to coordinate with DOJ and find itself responding to new indictments from the DOJ; and indeed we might well see the House January 6 Committee stretch its legs in ways we haven’t yet seen, as it would now have two full years of uninterrupted investigation ahead of it (and it could surely bring Kinzinger and Cheney on board as investigators just as easily as a new Senate January 6 Committee could). If or as the House January 6 Committee investigation expands and becomes the truly comprehensive probe it aims to be and certainly should be, could the Senate really remain idle and aloof? That’s an open question that would need to be quickly answered in this scenario.

Conclusion

By January 2023, both of the heroic Republicans on the House January 6 Committee will be gone from Congress, along with a number of House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump for his actions on and before January 6. All of them are now, presumably, available (though whether or not they are also willing is another matter) to serve as adjuncts to, or spokespeople for, a duly constituted Senate select committee focusing on January 6. There’s simply is no reasonable argument to make to suggest that Senate Democrats can’t turn such any such new select committee into a bipartisan endeavor, whether or not Mitch McConnell agrees to allow members of his caucus to join it (indeed, it would be just like McConnell to publicly forbid any Republican in the Senate from doing so while secretly green-lighting one member of his caucus—e.g., Romney—to join the effort as McConnell and the Republicans’ eyes and ears).

But we must also understand that by early 2023 Donald Trump will almost certainly be running for president. January 6 will be in the news almost daily. Republicans in the House will be working overtime, whether they’re in the majority there or not, to twist the facts about January 6 and lionize Trump. The urgency of telling the truth about January 6, 2021—particularly if, as is nearly certain to be the case, there are, say, new revelations to consider regarding those deleted Secret Service texts, Clarence Thomas and his wife and the Supreme Court, or Steve Bannon—may be even greater in 2023 than it was in 2022. Anyone who thinks January 6 is going to go away as a political issue doesn’t understand how Donald Trump brands himself and what his plans to run for president beginning in 2023 (at the latest) are likely to involve.

At present, the national polling averages—acknowledging, here, the imperfections inherent to all polls—give the Democrats a strong chance (65%) of taking the Senate.

That means the question of a Senate January 6 Committee is very much a “live” one.

And given that no one (outside the most cynically impatient members of our national media) doubts that an adequate January 6 investigation would extend well into 2023 at a minimum, it seems the only possible objection to the creation of a Senate January 6 Committee is a political one predicated on the political circumstances of the present—ignoring entirely the dire situation America will find itself in the moment Donald Trump formally announces a 2024 presidential run.

To Proof and perhaps many of those reading this, the question at this point is not whether the Senate should create a select committee to continue the congressional investigation of January 6, or even whether Senate Republicans would participate in that committee, but whether it makes sense for the Senate to discuss this possibility prior to the 2022 election or not. There may yet be an obscure parliamentary provision touching upon the authority of a Senate majority leader that prohibits the creation of a Senate select committee of a nature and in a fashion similar to that of the House January 6 Committee, but if there is I haven’t seen it yet. Even if it exists, it’s hard to imagine there’s no creative way for the majority party in the Senate to work around it. This is especially true given the obvious political and strategic costs for McConnell of not working with Senator Schumer to have at least some political presence on such a committee.

More surprising and difficult to react to is the complacency of the media on this issue.

A few days ago I for the first time heard a journalist use the word Senate—unanchored by an adjective or verb—in referencing the possible future of congressional January 6 investigations, but the word was merely left hanging there, and I haven’t since heard it repeated. It appears major media is ready to move on from an ongoing insurrection whether or not that ongoing insurrection is ready to move on from America.

And this, at the last, may be the most salient point on this topic: given that we know Trump’s insurrection is ongoing, and given that we know it now targets all fifty states rather than just the U.S. Capitol building, and every component of voting rather than merely a single joint session of Congress, how are Democratic voters—or for that matter any voter in America who believes in America—to react to the notion that we do not need a (acknowledging the slight paradox here) “standing select committee” to consider the throughline from January 6 to what’s happening right now?

How can the nation’s legislative branch proceed blind into the abyss of autocratic neo-fascism solely on the basis of Democrats currently controlling the executive branch?

To term this the height of folly would be understatement; it’s dereliction of duty of the highest order, and endangers our nation. Recall too that we’re not just staring down the possible absence of any congressional investigation of an ongoing insurrection that began on January 6, but this inexplicable absence arrives in the face of a likely insurrectionist House that will dedicate itself to feeding insurrection and nothing else. Indeed, it was just three weeks ago that accused pedophile and stalwart Trump ally Matt Gaetz told reporters that in his view Trumpist insurrectionists would feel “betrayed” if any new House Republican majority didn’t immediately move toward “impeachment inquiries.” He added, ominously, that such sham investigations should be the hallmark of a new insurrectionist bloc American voters appear close to voting for (thinking that doing so will lead to new economic policies); says Gaetz, “It should be investigations first and policy [and] bill-making…as a far, far diminished priority.”

So if Americans are perhaps on the verge of voting an insurrectionist front group into power for policy reasons, despite the group having no interest in advancing any policy beyond the harassment of innocents, what will the Senate be doing in the meanwhile?

Not working with the House, it seems. Consider this worrying Politico story from July:

POLITICO @politico

The Senate’s latest bipartisan project — reform of a 135-year-old election law Donald Trump tried to exploit on Jan. 6 — is landing with a thud in the House

politico.comJan. 6 panel Dems throw shade at Senate’s bipartisan foray into their turfThe proposal designed to prevent a future Capitol-riot-style election challenge needs buy-in from both chambers. And for now, they’re diverging.

If the Senate has any intention of engaging in a turf battle with the House, it better have its own ducks in a row: a January 6 congressional investigation worthy of the name, one that gives it the gravitas to stand toe-to-toe with House negotiators in pushing important election reforms. Otherwise America will be left with a House of Representatives that’s passing no laws and a Senate that’s doing—well—nothing at all.

And what about the executive branch? Certainly, given that Democrats will continue to hold control over the executive branch no matter what happens this November, we can expect some action on January 6 from agencies besides DOJ in that quarter, right?

Apparently not, as President Biden has declined to fire any of the Trump-appointed inspectors general currently in place within his administration—the follow-through on a vague campaign promise intended at the time to distinguish him from Trump, who fired IGs whenever they began investigating him or his friends—which has left these right-wing politicos free to scuttle meaningful investigation into actions taken at either the Secret Service or the Pentagon on and/or before January 6.

As detailed exhaustively in the fourth book of the bestselling Proof series, Proof of Coup (2022), DHS had actually been searching for the Secret Service texts it illegally deleted en masse before being told by its Trump-appointed inspector general to stop looking (yes, really). This guaranteed that the missing texts wouldn’t be found before the next House—anticipated to be a GOP-led one—is seated.

Whether this obstruction of congressional oversight by Trump’s executive-branch holdovers was intentional or not, its effect was to deny Congress—not one committee but all of Congress—the ability to get a meaningful response from the executive branch to a legislative branch subpoena. So it’s now in the interest of all members of Congress to see legislative branch subpoenas continue to have weight, which means that even as we have diminished expectations for executive-branch aid to the investigation of January 6, we should be seeing some urgency in both houses of Congress to demand it.

Either Democrats think that Donald Trump is a clear and present danger to the future of the United States or they do not. If they opt not to take congressional investigation of his actions on and before January 6 to its natural conclusion, but rather allow it to be prematurely terminated by his GOP co-conspirators on the argument—an entirely political one—that investigation of January 6 via select committee should be limited to the U.S. House of Representatives, there can be no moral justification for it.

In stating this so baldly, Proof aims to push aside, in the near term and maybe forever, the farcical idea that anything disclosed about Trump and January 6 can keep him from being the GOP nominee in 2024 if he wants to be. Every Democratic attack on Trump is instantly transmuted into a feather in his cap in the eyes of those who vote in GOP primaries, and it’s the case right now in October 2022—and will be the case for all 2023 and the first ten months of 2024—that the only thing that can keep Donald Trump from running for president again and being the Republican nominee again is a criminal indictment that leads to his pretrial incarceration (in which case he would continue running for office, but might find his chances of success greatly diminished) or else an improbable bicameral resolution from Congress that encompasses Trump’s 2020 and early 2021 conduct and thereby prohibits him from running for federal office.

In the absence of any of this, Democrats will be left to wonder whether their leaders actually want to preserve Trump as a 2024 presidential contender because they, like Paul Ryan, believe he cannot win the White House again—and are willing to risk the future of the United States and Western-style democracy on that bet. In the view of Proof, however, any Democrat who seeks to bolster Trump as a political strategy lacks patriotism, and any Democrat who claims a Senate January 6 Committee would have no purpose lacks understanding of January 6 or the ongoing insurrection it spawned.

Whatever the Democrats do, we already know what the Republican Party is planning.

Steve Bannon, who DOJ just recommended be federally imprisoned for six months on a Contempt conviction—the maximum sentence under federal Sentencing Guidelines—has made clear exactly what he’ll be up to the moment he returns from any period of incarceration: fomenting a revolution. As he recently said, if Republicans take the House in 2023 because U.S. voters have inexplicably voted into government the very men and women who are fighting to permanently destroy it, “We [will] have…a real January 6 committee, including to get to the staffers [who already testified against Trump before Congress] and see about the lies and misrepresentations they put on national television to defame people. I would tell the House January 6 [Committee] staff right now: preserve your documents, because there’s going to be a real [House] committee, and this is going to be backed by Republican grassroots voters to say we want to get to the bottom of this for the good of the nation.”

If Senate Democrats cannot or will not do anything to stand in the breach in the face of this open call for continued insurrection and the punishment of patriotic whistle-blowers, perhaps America deserves to lose its democracy and tripartite government—as there would certainly be little evidence that we’re making use of it at the moment.

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