Byron York: A new get-Trump committee?
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/byron-yorks-daily-memo-a-new-get-trump-committee
A congressional investigation is a fact-finding enterprise. The members aren’t neutral finders of fact — they are Republicans and Democrats who often fight over the subject and scope of the investigation. But the idea is to find facts.
Now take a look at the new Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, created this week in a nearly party-line vote in the House. Even before the investigation begins, the chairman of the committee, Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson, has already found all the facts he needs to find former President Donald Trump guilty of incitement. We know because Thompson has said so, over and over again, in a lawsuit blaming Trump for the riot.
In February, Thompson, acting in his personal capacity, filed suit against Trump, presidential lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and the groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers. Whatever its title, the suit is about Trump; the other defendants are just supporting players. Trump is named 126 times in the document, versus 40 for Giuliani, 47 for the Proud Boys, and 18 for the Oath Keepers. In other words, the suit is about Trump.
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Thompson begins with the declaration that Trump and the others “conspired to incite an assembled crowd to march upon and enter the Capitol of the United States for the common purpose of disrupting, by the use of force, intimidation and threat, the approval by Congress of the count of votes cast by members of the Electoral College as required by Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution.” The suit says Trump created a “unified plan” to incite and then carry out the riot — the suit calls it an “insurrection” 12 times — with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers the junior partners doing the actual fighting. Thompson asks a judge to declare Trump guilty of violating 42 US Code 1985, the law covering “conspiracy to interfere with civil rights.”
So now the same Representative Thompson is leading the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. He has already decided who to blame — the task now is just to formalize the verdict.
Will the investigation become the Get-Trump Committee? Consider this. The actions of the rioters themselves, definitely including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, are already under intense investigation by the Justice Department. So far more than 500 people have been charged. “Prosecutors have called the case ‘unprecedented’ in scale,” CBS News reported this week, “and the government said in a March court filing that the Capitol attack ‘is likely the most complex investigation ever prosecuted by the Department of Justice.”
The select committee will undoubtedly defer to the Justice Department when it comes to the ongoing investigations of accused rioters. Besides, the House of Representatives has nowhere near the resources that the Department can devote to the case. So let’s just say the select committee won’t be leading the investigation into the riot itself.
Then there is the subject of the lack of preparedness by Capitol Police and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The new committee can certainly cover that ground — it is already under investigation by a House committee and a pair of Senate committees — but there was no need to create a new committee to do it.
So most of what a Capitol riot committee would investigate is already being investigated or could be investigated without a new committee. But there is one last subject area: Trump. And that is what the new committee, at heart, is about. “The 13-member panel…is meant to examine President Donald J. Trump’s role in inspiring the riot,” reported the New York Times this week. “While the measure creating [the committee] 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.'”
The Trump part of the investigation is likely to be troubled. Demands for information will run afoul of privilege claims — Trump was, of course, president at the time, and he and his former top aides might refuse to testify or supply information. If any White House figures do testify, televised hearings could easily become a circus as the two parties fight over Trump. And Republicans, of course, will point out that the House has already formally accused Trump of incitement, in the second impeachment, and he was acquitted in a post-presidential Senate trial.
But the bottom line is: Chairman Thompson already knows Trump is guilty. Thompson was chosen for the job by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has displayed an obsession with getting Trump through two impeachments and long, fruitless investigations. In the end, look for the select committee to reach a conclusion similar to what House Democrats reached, after virtually no investigation or debate, just days after the riot took place.
For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.
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