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Republicans Release Their Jan. 6 Report. Which Riot Did They See?

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

As the mostly Democratic House committee investigating the Jan. 6. 2021, attack on the Capitol blamed “one man,” former President Donald Trump, as its central cause, House Republicans found someone else to blame in their own report on security failures at the Capitol:

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, of course.

As anyone who has been paying more than a nanosecond of attention to the Jan. 6 probe knows, blaming Pelosi for any of it stands in the school of goofy logic like blaming a homeowner for the burglary of her own home.

No wonder Merriam-Webster recently chose “gaslighting” — often elaborate efforts to convince you that you can’t believe your own eyes — as its word of the year.

Lying, of course, is about as bipartisan as any word can be. In Washington, I trace the current era of whoppers to Trump’s campaign that he virtually launched by claiming President Barack Obama wasn’t born an American citizen.

He held on to it with elaborate yarns about how, among other claims, he was sending investigators to Hawaii to search for Obama’s birth certificate. As a close observer of that campaign, I well remember how much political support he gained from that lie.

 

Some people wished so much for it to be true that the belief became something of a political and cultural marker as to whose side you were on — or what political tribe you were in — just as belief in Trump’s “stolen election lie” became a marker of one’s loyalties in GOP circles.

So as much as House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, of California, said soon after Jan. 6 on the House floor that Trump bore some responsibility for the attack, weeks later, he traveled to Mar-a-Lago to meet with the former president, and soon all seemed to be forgiven — in public, at least.

Now that McCarthy is in a tight race to be speaker of the House after the Republicans take the majority next year, the last thing he wants to do is show anything less than full loyalty to the former president, even with Trump’s big lie about a stolen election as part of the bargain.

The GOP report comes from the five Republicans whom McCarthy initially appointed to serve on the select committee before deciding members of his party would not participate: Rodney Davis of Illinois, Jim Banks of Indiana, Troy Nehls of Texas, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota.

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