What the January 6 Committee Missed – By Dan Friedman (Mother Jones) / Dec 30, 2022
To focus on Trump, the committee pulled some important punches.
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The January 6 committee’s final report has 845 pages and not a word against Mike Pence. The committee lauds the former VP and other top Trump administration figures for refusing to go along with Donald Trump’s attempted self-coup. But it does not address those same officials’ decision to remain silent about Trump’s lies for weeks after the election—a silence that helped the Stop the Steal movement grow from disorganized online conspiracy theories to a violent force that sacked the Capitol.
The committee is also gentle with the Capitol Police and other federal agencies involved in security, excusing their faulty preparation for January 6. “The President of the United States inciting a mob to march on the Capitol and impede the work of Congress is not a scenario our intelligence and law enforcement communities envisioned for this country,” the report’s executive summary says. “Prior to January 6th, it was unimaginable. Whatever weaknesses existed in the policies, procedures, or institutions, they were not to blame for what happened on that day.”
This argument, which appears throughout the committee’s report, is simply not credible. Law enforcement agencies may not have known precisely what Trump would say that day, but he had been repeating the same lies for weeks. And far-right groups were planning to march toward the Capitol even before Trump’s speech. Everyone knew they were coming.
CONTINUE > https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/12/what-the-january-6-committee-missed/
