The Triumph of the January 6 Committee

At this point, Donald Trump has been indicted enough times that there’s a routine to how the story unfolds. First the former president posts something dyspeptic on Truth Social announcing that he’s been informed by prosecutors that he’ll be facing charges. Then everyone waits. After an excruciating delay, the indictment is revealed, accompanied by more angry Truth Social posts and a press conference by an unsmiling prosecutor standing in front of an American flag.

The first two indictments—in Manhattan, for Trump’s role in coordinating hush-money payments in advance of the 2016 election, and in federal court in Florida, over the squirreling-away of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago—raised serious questions about Trump’s abuses of authority and his willingness to cheat and deceive in order to acquire and hold on to power. But the third indictment cuts the deepest. Yesterday, Special Counsel Jack Smith announced charges against Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and for his role in fueling the insurrection on January 6.

The indictment directly attacks the once and would-be future president’s desperate campaign to stay in power after his 2020 loss. The claims Trump made about election fraud “were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the government asserts. Trump has been charged with the evocatively titled crime of conspiracy against the United States. He also faces charges of obstructing an official proceeding—that is, Congress’s counting of the electoral vote on January 6, which he attempted to disrupt with a riot he engineered—and a statute known as Section 241, a Reconstruction-era law that prohibits conspiring against the rights of another. The right in question, in this case, is that of the voters, whose ballots Trump sought to disregard in order to seize power for himself.

[Tom Nichols: This is the case]

The indictment tells a stark, damning story about what happened in the weeks and months after the 2020 election and in the run-up to January 6. Trump and a selection of unnamed co-conspirators tried to persuade state officials to ignore the popular vote in their states to favor Trump over Joe Biden; when that didn’t work, they coordinated slates of “fake electors” to sow doubt over Biden’s Electoral College victory; when that didn’t work, they tried to strong-arm the Justice Department into pressuring state legislators to back Trump’s claims; when that didn’t work, they worked to persuade Vice President Mike Pence to abuse his role presiding over the counting of the electoral vote and upend the process. And when Pence refused, Trump turned to violence—encouraging an angry crowd to march on the Capitol to threaten the vice president into submission.

Set out in grainy black and white, stamped with the markings of the federal court system, the special counsel’s account of those events is a splash of cold water. This really did happen, no matter how much Trump and his allies have tried to deny it. Part of what’s striking, though, is how familiar the story seems. A hefty portion of the indictment—though not all of it—draws from the narrative set out by the House select committee on the January 6 attack, which wrapped up its work in January 2023 after a string of blockbuster hearings and the release of a mammoth 800-page report. In that sense, the indictment is an extraordinary endorsement of the committee’s work.

The broad strokes of what happened from November 2020 to January 2021 were, of course, apparent in the moment to anyone reading the news. Trump whipped up the riot in real time and then tweeted his approval as it was ongoing. But the January 6 committee was able to unearth evidence of Trump’s close involvement with the development of the various schemes set in motion by his supporters—along with a mountain of testimony about the many, many, many times the president was informed that his claims of fraud had no merit, that he had clearly lost the election, and that the legal arguments he was relying on to claim otherwise weren’t worth the paper they were written on. These discoveries guide the indictment’s narrative, and they’re key to the argument Smith is setting out about Trump’s legal culpability.

Some of the indictment’s most striking quotes made their first appearance in testimony by witnesses before the committee. “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories” about election fraud, the document quotes an unnamed “Co-Conspirator 1” telling Rusty Bowers, the speaker of the Arizona house. Bowers told the committee in a public hearing that those words were spoken to him by Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

This isn’t to say that the indictment is a dull rerun. There’s new information to be found—for example, that Pence was keeping contemporaneous notes of his conversations with Trump during those harrowing last months. One campaign adviser complained in a freshly unearthed December 2020 email that “it’s tough to own any of this when it’s just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” In a particularly chilling new detail, Smith recounts a conversation between “Co-Conspirator 4”—seemingly the Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who unsuccessfully pushed for the department to back Trump’s claims of voter fraud—and a White House lawyer who objected to Clark’s plan to keep Trump in power. The lawyer reportedly told Clark that such a scheme would result in “riots in every major city in the United States.” Clark, referencing a controversial reading of the president’s authority to send in the military to quell civilian unrest, responded, “That’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

[David A. Graham: Trump attempted a brazen, dead-serious attack on American democracy]

“The committee served as educating the country about what the former president did, and this is finally accountability,” Soumya Dayananda, a senior investigator for the January 6 committee, told The New York Times. The standard for presenting evidence in a courtroom is far higher than that for airing claims before Congress, and Smith clearly believes he can prove the charges against Trump beyond a reasonable doubt.

During the committee’s efforts, there was always a tense dynamic between House investigators and the Justice Department: the two squabbled over access to evidence, and at times the department seemed shamed into picking up the pace in its own lagging investigation by the committee’s forward motion. But half a year after the House finished its work, the executive branch has taken the baton and started running.