Republicans Are Trying for a Capitol Riot Coverup

Republicans Are Trying for a Capitol Riot Coverup

Putting insurrection apologists on a House investigative panel amounts to a claim that nobody tried to subvert the election.

July 21, 2021, 8:30 PM GMT+9

Something happened.

Something happened. Photographer: Brent Stirton/Getty Images

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With the announcement that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is putting some of the same Republicans on the Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection who egged on the riot at the Capitol in the first place, it’s pretty clear — if it wasn’t already — that the Republican strategy will be to pretend that nothing important happened, and to throw mud everywhere to undermine the investigation by the House of Representatives.

As Greg Sargent pointed out in the Washington Post, this — along with the expected refusal of various Republicans to cooperate with fact-finding — constitutes a form of coverup. That’s hardly a surprise, but it does create some tricky challenges for those Democrats and Republicans who take the situation seriously.

Quinta Jurecic of the legal affairs website Lawfare makes some good points, however, about the public relations advantages the situation gives to the committee. After all, it was Republicans who blocked formation of a nonpartisan commission that Democrats had attempted to set up. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has used one of her slots on the committee for a Republican, Wyoming’s Liz Cheney. House Republicans such as Ohio’s Jim Jordan and Indiana’s Jim Banks will doubtless spend their time on the select committee accusing Democrats of partisanship, but their case isn’t an easy one to make. 

The challenge for the media is twofold. The first part is to avoid falling into a “both sides” trap in which the only things of interest are the partisan tactics that Democrats and Republicans will engage in, rather than keeping their focus on the events of Jan. 6 and the things that produced them.

The second part? The coverup. The New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen argues that this is an unusual coverup for news organizations to cover because it’s being conducted in public. And indeed, the political scientist Brendan Nyhan is correct that this “in turn makes the media far less interested in it.” But perhaps that’s just as well. The myth of Watergate and other scandals has been that the coverup is worse than the crime. In fact, however, the Watergate coverup, as felonious as it was, wasn’t nearly as terrible as the original crimes that were being covered up.

And more to the point: The Watergate coverup was the only survival strategy that had even a chance to work for President Richard Nixon. Had he confessed all his misdeeds after the police stopped his operatives as they broke in to Democratic Party headquarters in 1972, he and most of the White House and campaign senior staff would have been giving prosecutors a put-us-in-jail-free card.

It’s similar today. Republicans who are pretending that the Capitol insurrection never happened, or that it wasn’t a big deal, or that it was really the Federal Bureau of Investigation or antifa or little green men who rioted, and who are pretending that former President Donald Trump didn’t openly call for groups such as the Proud Boys to help him keep the White House even after he lost the 2020 election, are engaged in a coverup that Republicans have chosen because they can’t acknowledge their complicity in what really happened.

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There’s plenty that we don’t know about Jan. 6, but the basic outlines of what happened were either always in public or, as with Trump’s calls to pressure election officials, have become public by now. And what they add up to is devastating for Trump and his allies and enablers. Thus the coverup — and thus the need for everyone not participating in the coverup to keep focused on the original crime, which was an attempt to subvert democracy and overturn an election.

1. Deborah Avant at the Monkey Cage on the assassination of the President of Haiti.

2. Dan Drezner on current world crisis spots.

3. Zach Montellaro reports some excellent news: Rick Hasen and David Kaye will lead a new Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at University of California-Irvine.

4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Michael R. Strain on the merits of billionaires in space.

5. Philip Klein on the tricky timing involved in running for the Republican presidential nomination. Good points — although remember that candidates can run for a long time without officially announcing their candidacies. As several are doing right now.

6. Lawrence Glickman on opposition to Reconstruction — and its parallels today.

7. Karen Tumulty on vaccine requirements.

8. And Jonathan Chait on Trump and Tom Brady.

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Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Jonathan Landman at jlandman4@bloomberg.net