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Even before Liz Cheney made her announcement this week, another autumn of Donald Trump dominating the political scene seemed inevitable.
But now, it’s official.
Cheney, the vice chair of the House Select Committee Investigating the January 6 Attack on the Capitol, made a great deal of news in the panel’s public hearing Thursday night — not least by revealing the hearings would resume after the August recess.
“See you all in September,” the Wyoming Republican said.
Truth is, even if the committee had wrapped this week, the former president would still be looming over the fall landscape like a rising harvest moon.
The House committee has had much to do with that, serving up the cream of its evidence in eight hearings that might have been episodes in a streaming TV series. The season-ender Thursday night was a three-hour special and arguably its most dramatic to date.
Mixing live testimony and riveting videotape, the panel took us back to the 187 minutes of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump, then still president, refused to do anything to halt the invasion.
Even as the protesters became rioters, breaching the closed Capitol and shouting “Hang Mike Pence,” and even as Pence’s Secret Service detail feared for their lives, Trump sat in a dining room off the Oval Office. He watched the mayhem while phoning senators he thought might still help him overturn the results of the election he had lost.
We also saw the president struggling to tape a video the next day, complaining: “I don’t want to say the election’s over.”
Returning soon to a screen near you
So the panel’s Season Two will drop in a matter of weeks. But even if the hearings were over and done, the consequences would only be beginning.
There would still need to be a final report and a decision on making a criminal referral. That would leave the question of indicting the former president in the hands of the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland (who might also indict based on Justice’s own investigation).
The latest polling indicates more than half the country is paying at least some attention to the January 6 panel’s prosecutorial presentations. And while relatively few Americans expected to see Trump indicted before the hearings began (and 6 in 10 still don’t), half the country now says he should be. That’s the key takeaway from the latest NPR/PBS News Hour/Marist poll this week.
If Trump is indicted, the process of his arraignment, pleading, pretrial motions and trial will be as big a news story as a presidential election. And it may drag on nearly as long, or seem to.
If he is not indicted, Trump will declare himself exonerated and treat the entire episode as a triumph. Wags have suggested he might…
Read More: As Jan. 6 panel pauses, the U.S. faces a fourth fall of Trump (with a fifth in view) : NPR