How the Jan 6. committee saved America | Will Bunch Newsletter

This introduction is rated “X”: No one under the name of Elon Musk will be admitted. Seriously, if the world’s richest man wanted to spend $44 billion to utterly destroy The Website Formerly Known As Twitter — bizarrely rebranded by Musk on Sunday as X — to please Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and the world’s other worst dictators, would it look any different from what we’ve seen? Why is Elon flipping “the bird”?

📮 Affirmative action is a sensitive topic, but a few of you were brave enough to weigh in on the recent Supreme Court ruling and the way forward for diversity on college campuses. Most agreed that more must be done to boost admission of lower-income Black and brown students. Complained Mary Ann Petro: “The conservatively controlled Supreme Court wants to return our country to a time when the select few — i.e., white and wealthy — could go to college, be offered a professional position after graduation, get married, buy a home, and start a family.” She’s not wrong.

Next week’s question. Should the U.S. continue to send billions of dollars in foreign aid to Israel, given that nation’s turn away from democracy? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

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This weekend, a row of TV production trucks lined up outside of the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in the heart of Washington, D.C. The Big Media occupants are waiting for the exact same thing that roughly half of America has been waiting for, for some 30 months: the indictment of Donald Trump and maybe some top lieutenants for trying to stop the peaceful transfer of presidential power after the 2020 election.

It’s been one week since the 45th president received a “target letter” from the Justice Department’s Special Prosecutor Jack Smith asking him to appear before the Prettyman-based federal grand jury that, according to leaked reports of the letter, is investigating Trump for conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and deprivation of rights under the color of law.

Based on the way that Trump’s first federal indictment — in the classified documents case — went down, America should expect news of this second, and arguably more important, tangle of charges any minute. It could be just hours after you read this. While you wait, there are two big picture things to think about.

First, if Trump went unpunished for trying to prevent the transfer of power to President Joe Biden after the Democrat was fairly elected with 74 more votes in the Electoral College (and 7 million more popular votes), then we don’t have a country anymore. Of all the felony cases involving Trump, this one would matter most because it involves his actions as president of the United States, and could answer once and for all whether our chief executive is above the law.

Second, this life-or-death test for American democracy came so incredibly close to never happening.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection, as the cries of “Hang Mike Pence” still bounced around the granite floors of the U.S. Capitol, there was an immediate push by federal prosecutors and others to identify the hundreds of rioters who stormed the building and stalled for hours the certification of Biden’s victory. Yet there seemed little taste for prosecuting Trump and his henchmen for summoning the mob, or the nearly two months of election denial and coup plotting that led up to the event.

It felt like Richard Nixon’s famous post-Watergate boast to interviewer David Frost — that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” — had been enshrined as an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The FBI, which threw itself into the hard work of identifying hundreds of insurrectionists caught on video, and tracking them down, had no interest initially in going after Trump, who was popular with many of its conservative-minded agents. Last month, the Washington Post reported that the bureau had for an entire year resisted opening any probe into the role that Trump or some of his top advisers played before and during Jan. 6.

But it wasn’t just the FBI. The same Post article also chronicled, in chapter and verse, how the Justice Department under the new, understated Attorney General Merrick Garland constructed a mountain of resistance to any criminal probe of Trump. The reasons for this are complicated and hard to understand for many in the general public who, along with some top Democratic politicians, were clamoring for such an investigation. The evidence wasn’t there, some prosecutors argued. Others were driven by “institutional caution,” or the fear that investigating the previous president would look too political — the opposite of Garland’s plan for restoring public faith in the Justice Department after its troubled times during the Trump administration.

As the first anniversary of the insurrection approached in January 2022, it seemed increasingly likely that a president who’d plotted to undo a free and fair election before turning his attention to an attempted coup would go unpunished.

Then something happened to dramatically change the situation. The newly formed House Select Committee on Jan. 6 entered the chat.

This success story has many fathers...and mothers. It starts with then Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who shared the trauma of the siege of the Capitol with her fellow lawmakers and insisted on a legislative investigation of Jan. 6. Calling the probe “deadly serious,” Pelosi was in some way the un-Garland — crafting a plan to move ahead with a couple of dissident Republican members after GOP leaders tried to prevent any effort at all.

The committee and its hearings in the summer and fall of 2022 produced political rock stars and a handful of superstars. This included the committee chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, whose experiences growing up Black in the nation’s most segregated state gave him a unique moral gravitas; Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the heiress to a right-wing political legacy whose disgust at Trump’s antics mattered more than her conservatism or reelection; and Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who found his calling as Capitol Hill’s most eloquent defender of the Constitution in the midst of grief over his son’s death by suicide.

But stardom needed strategy, not to mention that hard work of members and staff interviewing more than 1,000 witnesses before its first major public hearing, and obtaining more than one million pages of documents. Its plan turned the staid model of the congressional hearing on its head — not bogged down by the typical partisan back and forth. Instead, the Jan. 6 committee crafted slick packages for the American viewing public, making extensive use of hours of video footage of the fateful day and spinning coherent narratives about Trump’s election-result denial and some of his shocking activities on the day of the insurrection.

The public responded in a big way. At least 20 million people watched the Jan. 6 committee’s first televised hearing in primetime — a huge audience in today’s balkanized America. Those who watched heard jarring revelations — such as the testimony of former White House aide turned whistleblower Cassidy Hutchinson, who described Trump’s angry, thwarted desire to go to the Capitol that day — that moved public opinion toward the idea that the president indeed committed crimes.

This had famously happened before. In 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Watergate held TV hearings about the Oval Office misdeeds of Nixon — who’d been at the height of his popularity, re-elected in a landslide — that mesmerized the nation and began to turn the tide toward the 37th president’s ouster. In a different millennium and a radically changed America, the House Jan. 6 Committee had the same level of impact.

Suddenly, Garland’s slow-moving Justice Department and the FBI couldn’t ignore either the new evidence produced by the congressional probe, nor the change in public opinion its hearings helped create. The Post recently reported: “One person directly familiar with the department’s new interest in the case said it felt as though the department was reacting to the House committee’s work as well as heightened media coverage and commentary. ‘Only after they were embarrassed did they start looking,’ the person said.”

The rest is history. As the FBI started collecting the damning evidence it should have been collecting a year earlier, and as Trump re-entered the political arena, Garland felt he had little choice but to appoint Smith, who has been a prosecutorial pitbull. When you watch the inevitable breaking news of Trump’s next, biggest indictment, take a moment to say thanks to the brave and clever men and women of the House Jan. 6 Committee. They revived the legacy of Watergate to show that on its best day, government can actually work.

Question: How will Trump indictments affect 2024 elections? — Via It’s Dr. Brown To You, Kiddo (@DocJaniceL) on Twitter

Answer: Dr. Brown, you’ve asked a very simple question with a very complicated answer. It’s become clear over the course of 2023 that every new indictment seems to boost Donald Trump in the GOP primary polls — contravening several centuries of political science. So we know the “what,” but why? I think Trump’s large base has made up their minds about the 45th president, and each new felony count says nothing to them about Trump and everything about the despicableness (to them) of his enemies in the media and the Democratic Party. It just feeds their hatred of elites that fuels their movements. But much like Trump’s botched handling of COVID in 2020, a sliver of suburban independent men will be put off by the indictments. Will that be enough for Joe Biden, like in 2020? Stay tuned.

If anything has marked the rapid political rise of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, it’s his ability to latch onto the cultural zeitgeist. This weekend, it was peak Shapiro as the first-year Democratic governor tweeted (or X’ed) not once but twice about the movie event of the decade, the launch of Barbie. “I must say I’m a Barbie guy,” Shapiro posted in a jocular video on July 20, as he whipped out a pink tie. Yet one segment of Pennsylvania voters was not particularly amused: climate-change activists. One of them, Karen Feridun of the Better Path Coalition, started a social media campaign to note that the governor has tweeted more about Barbie than the world “climate,” which he had not mentioned in a tweet since his fall 2022 campaign.

Maybe Shapiro or his staff were reading, because the governor did subsequently mention “climate change” in a Twitter/X post about capping methane from abandoned wells across Pennsylvania. Still, the governor continues to pass on other opportunities to use his bully pulpit to advocate for the environment amid a growing climate crisis. He didn’t mention the role of fossil-fuel pollution in his high-profile response to the flash flood in Bucks County believed to have killed seven people — even after experts said an overheated Atlantic Ocean seems to have fueled that storm’s intensity. Six months in, Shapiro’s biggest move on the accelerating crisis — also linked recently to air-quality “code red” alerts caused by dense smoke from Canadian wildfires — has been to appoint a panel that meets in secret and hasn’t divulged the names of all its members.

Climate activists find this record disturbing, and so do I. Pundits say Shapiro may be worried about his political alliance with organized labor, which sees fossil-fuel projects as a potential source of jobs. Perhaps, but other pro-union Democratic governors have not been nearly as shy or silent. “We knew this beast of climate change was coming for us, but now, it’s pounding on the door,” Washington state Gov. Jay Inslee said recently. How bad will things have to get for Shapiro to share that level of urgency? Feridun and her fellow activists hope to give Shapiro a nudge on Aug. 3 when they plan to dress in Barbie-inspired attire to present him the latest dire report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Be sure to wear your pink tie, governor — and listen.

It feels like yesterday but actually it was seven years ago this night that I sat in the sweltering press tent outside the Wells Fargo Center, with CNN on my iPhone as I frantically tried on deadline to file a column about Sen. Bernie Sanders addressing the Democratic National Convention in that pivotal year. I could already see the big story was not so much Bernie’s words as his supporters, whose unrest over the nomination of Hillary Clinton was a bad omen for November. I wrote: “But for some, Sanders’ infectious idealism about an America where the people rule, and not corporations, has been channeled into vitriol against Clinton. They’d all gone to look for America. Now they’re looking for something else.” Revisit that fateful time and my July 25, 2016 column: “Bernie tries to bridge troubled waters.”