So this is what the January 6th Committee public hearings are going to be all about
With the January 6th Committee having landed a number of key cooperating witnesses who have testified behind the scenes, we’re getting closer to the point where the committee puts the bulk of its case together and presents it in televised primetime hearings, complete with the public testimony of the most compelling cooperating witnesses. I’ve been wondering what narrative the media would settle on for these hearings, and now that’s starting to become more clear. Unfortunately, it’s not shaping up to be a particularly helpful narrative.
I knew the media’s prevailing narrative during the public hearings would be some variation of “The committee must do X or we’re all doomed!” I just wasn’t sure what X would be. But over the weekend the media began to tip its hand. The New York Times published an article which suggested that if the committee doesn’t end up making a criminal referral against Donald Trump to the DOJ, it’ll mean Trump has gotten away with it all. This is, suffice it to say, not how anything works.
I’ve said from the very start of this process that if the January 6th Committee ends up making a criminal referral against Trump, it’ll be to try to pressure the DOJ into prosecuting him. And if the committee doesn’t make a criminal referral against Trump, it’ll be because it’s determined that the DOJ has already decided to prosecute him; in such case a referral would be unnecessary, and might only serve to make the DOJ’s case against Trump look more partisan than it is.
Until recently, it wasn’t entirely clear if the DOJ was even so much as investigating Trump. Now we’ve all learned that the DOJ has in fact been investigating Trump on multiple fronts for at least months. We still don’t yet have any way of knowing whether the DOJ is going to end up prosecuting Trump, but now that we know the DOJ is at least investigating him, the odds of prosecution have certainly gone up.
So it’s not at all surprising that the January 6th Committee, which according to previous media leaks was leaning toward making a criminal referral against Trump at the end of its public hearings, is now reportedly less certain that a referral is necessary. This is a good thing. It means the committee now has less reason to fear that the DOJ might not be doing its job of its own accord.
To their credit, some legal pundits have made a point of spelling out more or less precisely what I’ve laid out above. Unfortunately, they’re largely being shouted down by more opportunistic pundits, who have decided to start insisting that if the committee doesn’t make a criminal referral against Trump, it means he’ll get away with it all. Some of the more unhinged Twitter pundits are even calling the committee members “cowards” and worse. Keep in mind that these are the same pundits who just spent the past few months incorrectly insisting that the DOJ wasn’t investigating Trump.
The bottom line is that most of the media and pundit class is gearing up to hit us with a whole new doomsday narrative about how we’re all doomed if the January 6th Committee doesn’t conclude its hearings by making a criminal referral against Donald Trump. This is precisely the kind of factually false doomsday narrative that the media thinks will scare more people into tuning in for its coverage during the timeframe of the public hearings.
Unfortunately, in this era, a fictional ratings-friendly doomsday narrative can travel around the world before a factually accurate explanation of the story can finish tying its shoes. It doesn’t help that once someone in the media settles on a doomsday narrative that’s particularly good at scaring people into staying tuned in, nearly the entire media and pundit class will then adopt that same narrative, in order to get in on the ratings grab.
So it’ll be important that we all make an effort to push back against this false narrative, because it’s a particularly harmful one. While the January 6th Committee’s public hearings are going on, we should be doing our jobs as activists by amplifying the committee’s messaging and findings. Instead the media and the pundits would rather we spend the public hearings idly fretting over whether the hearings mean we’re all doomed. We can’t afford to let the media play us like that. These hearings are too important for us to get sucked into wasting our time fretting, or even worse, getting baited by the most unhinged of Twitter pundits into mistakenly attacking the committee even while we’re supposed to be working with it.
