No, the January 6th Committee is not “running out of time” – and no, Trump’s people can’t “run out the clock”
Most pundits insisted that the January 6th Committee would never happen to begin with. Once they were proven wrong about that, they insisted the committee would never make any criminal referrals. When they were proven wrong about that, they insisted the DOJ would never act on any criminal referrals. Now that they’ve been proven wrong about that, they’re insisting the people who are being criminally indicted are somehow still winning, because they’re going to magically run out the clock.
By now it’s painfully clear that these doomsday pundits have been not only wrong, but baselessly and absurdly wrong, at every turn. Yet fear sells, so now they’re pushing the narrative that the likes of Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows are going to “get away with it all” because their criminal trials won’t take place until the middle of 2022.
For starters, when you’re going on criminal trial and very likely to be convicted and sent to prison, you’re not “getting away with” or “winning” anything. You’re clearly losing. In addition, as we’ve been pointing out since the 1/6 committee’s earliest days, the point of busting non-cooperating witnesses for contempt is to scare other witnesses into cooperating. Accordingly, Mike Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short, Ali Alexander, and others are indeed cooperating. Alexander even publicly stated that he’s cooperating because he doesn’t want to go to prison for contempt. In other words, it’s working.
But the fear mongers are now hyping up the 2022 midterms, and insisting that if the Republicans win the House, they’ll disband the January 6th Committee. This part is true; they’d get rid of it in a heartbeat. But from there, every scary thing the fear mongers are predicting is wrong, laughably wrong, and impossibly wrong.
To state the obvious, the committee members know how to read a calendar. They know when the midterms are. They know how much time they have to work with. They will, very obviously, complete their probe and make all their criminal referrals to the DOJ before the midterms. From there, the DOJ will prosecute those referrals no matter how the midterms go. The party that wins the midterms does not magically gain control of the DOJ. This is politics 101.
So no, the committee is not going to “run out of time.” This would require then, what, accidentally forgetting to make their criminal referrals on time? Do the likes of Adam Schiff, Bennie Thompson, and Liz Cheney strike you as complete idiots? Of course not. This is a fictional doomsday narrative made up by fear mongers for attention.
As for the likes of Bannon and Meadows “running out the clock,” this is also gibberish. They will be prosecuted for contempt, convicted, and sent to prison – as will everyone else who’s referred by the committee to the DOJ – regardless of how the midterms go. And again, the point of busting Bannon and Meadows isn’t to get Bannon and Meadows to cooperate (although Meadows stupidly turned over some crucial evidence against the Trump White House during his brief cooperation). The point of busting them is to get others to cooperate.
The committee does not need every subpoenaed witness to cooperate. It just needs a handful of the right kinds of witnesses to cooperate. That’s already in the process of happening. Meanwhile, Bannon and Meadows are heading to prison – and the fear mongers are left having to try to convince us that Bannon and Meadows are somehow winning by going to prison.
All this doomsday hysteria about the January 6th Committee is just concocted fear mongering, based on premises that are laughably absurd or literally not possible, and it’s coming from people who merely want attention. For us to properly focus on fighting and winning, we have to tune out this kind of doomsday nonsense. We have real problems to face, and real battles to fight. It’s a tough enough road as it is. There’s nothing more dangerous than allowing fictional doomsday hysteria, about scary things that aren’t even real, to distract us from our work ahead.
