LA Times
Jan. 6 hearings have become Trump's third impeachment — and a road map for prosecuting him
Doyle McManus
Sun, June 26, 2022, 4:00 AM
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 13: A video of former President Donald Trump is displayed on a screen during a House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th hearing in the Cannon House Office Building on Monday, June 13, 2022 in Washington, DC. The bipartisan Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack On the United States Capitol has spent nearly a year conducting more than 1,000 interviews, reviewed more than 140,000 documents day of the attack. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
The House's Jan. 6 committee plays a video of former President Trump at one of several recent hearings on the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times)
The House of Representatives launched its hearings on the Jan. 6 insurrection in the face of grimly low expectations.

Didn’t we already know what happened? After two impeachments and innumerable disclosures, was there anything new to learn about the misrule of Donald Trump?

The conventional wisdom turned out to be wrong.

The hearings have been informative, often gripping, sometimes dramatic. Former Trump aides have offered blunt assessments of their boss’ claims that the 2020 election was stolen. (“********,” in the concise judgment of former Atty. Gen. William Barr.)

Less prominent figures have described what it was like to become a target of the former president’s anger, like Ruby Freeman, the Georgia election worker whom Trump falsely denounced by name as “a professional vote scammer.”

“Do you know what it feels like to have the president of the United States target you?” the 62-year-old shop owner testified tearfully. “There is nowhere I feel safe.”

What has made the hearings an unexpected success isn’t, as some have suggested, Hollywood production values. They’re not all that slick.

The hearings have worked because they’re unusually well-organized — and, for Congress, refreshingly free of bloviation.

Each session has focused on one chapter in Trump’s sprawling plot: his bogus claims of fraud, his pressure on state officials to change the election results, his bullying of then-Vice President Mike Pence, all culminating in the riot he inspired on Jan. 6.

The basic facts have been familiar, but many of the details are new, especially the firsthand testimony from Republican officials.

It has added up to the equivalent of Trump’s third impeachment — this time, more damning than his first (in 2019, on Ukraine) or second (in 2021, immediately after the insurrection).

That wasn’t what the House committee intended — at least, not consciously.

“I don’t think that we conceived of this as another impeachment,” Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Burbank), a member of the committee who participated in the two earlier inquests, told me. “But it could have that impact.”

The word “impeach” originally means “to discredit,” Schiff noted.

“I would hope that what the public has seen in these hearings discredits and disqualifies Mr. Trump from ever holding office again,” he said.

In that sense, they’ve served as a kind of metaphorical impeachment.

The hearings have also served another purpose: They’ve shown the public a road map to the criminal charges Trump could face if Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland decides to prosecute him.

The committee and its leaders have have already cited at least three potential criminal offenses: inciting the riot on Jan. 6, obstructing a federal proceeding (by trying to block the count of the electoral vote), and conspiracy to defraud the United States (for example, by organizing bogus slates of “alternative electors”).