Jan. 6 panel is hurting Trump but not helping Biden or Democrats
by Niall Stanage - 07/13/22 5:20 AM ET
Seven public hearings into the work of the House select committee on Jan. 6, an odd paradox is emerging.
The hearings have hurt former President Trump. But they haven’t helped President Biden or his party.
The panel, comprised of seven Democrats and two Trump-critical Republicans, has made a compelling case against the former president.
He has been painted as willfully delusional in clinging to the fiction that the 2020 election was fraudulent and recklessly belligerent in his willingness to whip up his followers — including a crowd on Jan. 6, 2021, that he allegedly knew bore weapons.
The latest hearing on Tuesday added a serious — if vague — charge, laid in the closing minutes by Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.).
Cheney, the committee’s vice chair, implied the former president might have involved himself in witness tampering.
“President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation — a witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” said Cheney, who provided no further details. “That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call, and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice.”
Writ large, the hearings have loomed over the political landscape for more than a month, to Trump’s detriment.
An ABC News-Ipsos poll last month indicated that 58 percent of Americans believed he should face criminal charges for his conduct. An Associated Press-NORC poll, also last month, put the figure at 48 percent.
Whether Trump faces criminal charges over the Capitol insurrection, those events have already made him the only president in history to be twice impeached. The mere fact that the insurrection is a focal point of the news agenda has wounded him.
“There is no doubt that the former president is being bloodied politically by these hearings,” said GOP strategist Brad Blakeman, who was broadly supportive of Trump during his presidency.
Blakeman, a veteran of former President George W. Bush’s White House, said he believed the hearings had been partisan and inappropriate. But he said it was “just a fact” that Trump had been damaged.
Democrats, meanwhile, have emphasized what they see as the monumental scale of Trump’s wrongdoing.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), one of the panel’s members, contended Tuesday that a particular tweet from Trump in December 2020 “would galvanize his followers, unleash a political firestorm and change the course of our history as a country.”
In the tweet, Trump urged his followers to come to Washington on Jan. 6 for what he termed a “big protest” that “will be wild!”
But, for all that, the nation’s overarching political landscape still looks far more favorable for the GOP than for Trump’s Democratic tormentors.
Virtually no one in Washington believes the Democrats will be able to hold on to their slender majority in the House this November.
The party has been buffeted by inflation, high gas prices, concerns over crime and border security, and a general sense of public discontent after more than two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
No one has borne more blame or suffered more damage than Biden.
more
https://thehill.com/homenews/the-memo/3556735-the-memo-jan-6-panel-is-hurting-trump-but-not-helping-biden-or-democrats/
