US Capitol probe promises hearings on Trump, ‘Big Lie’

Americans were served up an engrossing night of television as a congressional panel laid out in detail Donald Trump’s culpability in last year’s US Capitol insurrection.Yet 17 months after the mayhem, the biggest challenge for the House of Representatives committee investigating the riot could be ensuring the brutal images of violence it played in prime time will pack the intended political punch.Thursday’s presentation was devastating for Trump, who was characterised as an ongoing threat to US democracy as he bids to carry his campaign to steal the last election into the next.The committee’s footage of hand-to-hand combat between police defending Congress and the mob Trump sent marching on the Capitol made for gut-wrenching viewing.Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards was shown being knocked unconscious and gave evidence in person about “slipping in people’s blood” as the carnage reached its savage peak.The hearing concluded with video of several members of the mob saying that they marched on the Capitol simply because Trump had asked them to.Liz Cheney – a rising Republican star until she refused to accept Trump’s false claims of a stolen election – carefully filleted every aspect of the former president’s so-called “Big Lie”.She repeatedly referred to the “illegality” of his “sophisticated seven-point plan” to overturn the election.Testimony from Trump’s allies – including his attorney-general Bill Barr and daughter Ivanka – underscored that he had been made aware again and again how dangerous his conspiracy theories were.The night got progressively worse for Trump, who didn’t lift a finger for hours to help quell the insurrection, according to the committee.And there were gasps in the room when Cheney quoted a witness claiming that Trump had said vice-president Mike Pence deserved to be hanged by the mob storming the Capitol.Starting at 10am ET/1400 GMT on Monday, the committee will focus on Trump’s contention that his defeat by Democrat Joe Biden was due to unfounded allegations of election fraud, the so-called “Big Lie”.The third hearing on June 15 will focus on Trump’s efforts to replace the US attorney-general in order to assemble a team at the Department of Justice to promote his false election claims.The fourth hearing, set for June 16, will focus on Pence, while the last two will focus on “how President Trump summoned a violent mob and directed them, illegally, to march on the US Capitol”, Cheney said.The challenge for Democrats – burned by the lukewarm public reaction to Trump’s two impeachments and numerous other revelations of misconduct – will be to ensure that his latest calumny registers with voters.While powerful images of the carnage may have jogged memories, much of the outrage appears to have dissipated since January last year, with voters increasingly focused on pocketbook issues such as soaring inflation.In a YouGov/University of Massachusetts poll in May, just 42% of respondents backed the drive to hold the insurrectionists accountable – a drop of 10 points in a year.“Trump is still doing well with his followers at the grassroots level,” Ahmed Zohny, a political science professor at Coppin State University in Baltimore, told AFP. “So unless the congressional committee on January 6 comes up with criminal evidence that prevents him from running again, it is unlikely that the (Republicans) in both the House and Senate will go against him.”Meanwhile, the refusal by Fox News – the go-to network for America’s cable-viewing conservatives – to air the presentation live and unabridged severely curtailed its reach among right-wing voters.