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

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.

So forgive me if I read the GOP security report, which McCarthy submitted as a supplement to the House committee’s official report, as another part of the gaslighting — not an outright lie but a major deflection to Capitol security matters with no mention of any accountability for then-President Trump.

From the beginning of the House investigation, Democrats and their two Republican members, Reps. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois and Liz Cheney of Wyoming, have been focused on the causes leading up to the insurrection and its aftermath. Republicans chose to focus on alleged breakdowns in security, which have been well documented but now enable the party to dance around other touchy questions, such as what was going on that fateful day in Donald Trump’s White House.

If you want to know more about who was trying to disrupt the peaceful transfer of presidential power that day and what role political leaders played behind the scenes, you might as well look somewhere else, like the full report of the official Jan. 6 committee.

What I find appalling even in the GOP report is how much it tries not only to deflect from Trump’s dereliction but also to actually sugarcoat his efforts to incite the mob of his supporters.

Trump waited hours before calling on the rioters to leave the Capitol, and yet the GOP report describes him as encouraging his supporters to demonstrate “peacefully,” leaving out the parts of his speech in which he encouraged his supporters to “fight like hell.” So much for peacemaking.

Kinzinger who, along with Cheney, essentially lost his seat for his disloyalty to Trump, tweeted a message to McCarthy on Friday that sounded surprisingly genial, at first:

“The unsung hero of the Jan. 6 committee is @GOPLeader Kevin McCarthy, who pulled his choices to obstruct the investigation, allowing for a smooth bipartisan investigation and presentation to America,” Kinzinger tweeted. “Thanks Kevin!”

Nobody should hold their breath waiting for McCarthy to respond. Sometimes, political courtesies demand too much.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)