House Speaker Nanci Pelosi: Google

By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Impatient with Senate Republicans for blocking the creation of a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi moved this week to create a select committee with subpoena power to conduct a Congressional investigation into the insurrection that nearly toppled a duly elected government by stopping the final vote to certify the election of Democrat Joe Biden as president.

Pelosi had signaled for weeks that she planned to take matters into her own hands if Republicans thwarted attempts to scrutinize the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists that resulted in five deaths and the injury of 140 police officers.

“Jan. 6 was a day of darkness for our country,” Pelosi told reporters. “Our temple of democracy was attacked by insurrectionists. The gleeful desecration of the Capitol resulted in multiple deaths, physical harm to over 140 members of law enforcement and terror and trauma among staff, workers and members.”

Pelosi said she preferred that the Senate follow the House’s lead and approve a bill to form a bipartisan commission, modeled after the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But with Republicans opposed and even downplaying the mob riot, which FBI investigations show involved concerted planning by members of right-wing militia groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, she conceded that no longer seemed possible so an investigation would be up to the House.

Less than 10 Republicans, the number needed to overcome a filibuster, supported an official inquiry.

“It is imperative that we seek the truth,” she said. “It is clear the Republicans are afraid of the truth.”

“Creating a select committee would hand Democrats who hold the majority the power to issue subpoenas for witnesses and documents that could reveal crucial facts,” according to New York Times coverage. “It would also all but guarantee that the investigation would take on a highly partisan dynamic on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have argued for months that Democrats are only dwelling on the riot to try to tarnish former President Donald J. Trump and their party.”

Commenters have pointed out that the Republican-controlled House created a select committee in 2014 to investigate an attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya, which Democrats denounced as intended to damage the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state.

“It ultimately became one of the longest, costliest and most bitterly partisan congressional investigations in history,” according to the Times.

Pelosi said the Jan. 6 committee would investigate the root causes of the insurrection, including white supremacist ideologies and extremist groups, as well as security failures at the Capitol that allowed it to happen.

“Several investigations into the assault are already underway, but none have a mandate to look comprehensively at the event similar to the fact-finding commissions that scrutinized the attack of Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963,” the Times reports.

The FBI has arrested about 500 people involved in the breach of the Capitol, and is pursuing potentially hundreds more, the agency’s new director has told Congress. Several congressional committees are conducting their own investigations, including two Senate panels that outlined law enforcement and intelligence failures that contributed to the partial success of the attack. Inspectors general have begun their own inquiries as well, finding lapses and miscalculations around the most violent attack on the Capitol in two centuries since the British attacked Washington in the War of 1812.

Much about what happened in Jan. 6 remains unknown.

Who put explosives outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic Parties that drew law enforcement attention away from the Capitol as the crowd grew and became more violent, for one. What was the level of coordination between extremist groups and the Trump supporters who planned the rally that preceded the attack? We know that Trump was watching the attack on big screen TVs, first in a tent near the White House and then inside. But other than challenging the election results for months and speaking to incite the insurrection at the “Stop the Steal Rally,” what level of coordination was there between the Trump administration and the insurrectionists? Were there tacit stand down orders to law enforcement agencies and the Department of Defense that kept the National Guard from responding to aid Capitol and DC Metro police for four hours?

The committee will also look at what changes are necessary to prevent such an attack from ever happening again.

“Most of us had our hearts set on an independent bipartisan commission similar to the 9/11 commission — the speaker was very invested in making that happen — we just ran into a brick wall of GOP opposition,” said Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and a member of Pelosi’s leadership team. “They apparently see no political mileage in undertaking any inquiry.”

Raskin, who led the impeachment case against Trump over a charge of inciting the riot, said his prosecution team was “not able to follow many leads about the president’s organization and mobilization of different groups to participate in the events of that day” and he hoped the select committee could pick up that work.

“We need to learn about how that coalition of extremists came together and who facilitated it and to what extent it’s a threat to us in the future,” he said.

It was not immediately clear who would sit on the committee or who would lead it. Pelosi said she hoped that Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California and the minority leader, would name “responsible” people to participate.

But McCarthy, who opposed the formation of an independent inquiry, said this week that he preferred to allow Senate committees that had already been examining the attack to continue, rather than creating the body that Pelosi was proposing.

“When it comes to what happened on Jan. 6, we want to get to the bottom of that. It’s disgusting what transpired that day,” he said. “Unfortunately, the speaker has always played politics with this. Time and again. She’s never once talked to me about it.”

Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, one of seven Republicans who voted to find Trump guilty of inciting the insurrection during the Senate’s impeachment trial, also said a select committee was unnecessary.

“Listen, they want to expand this to prosecute the former president — I get it,” he said. “But we need to get politics out of this. The American people need answers. They’ve gotten a lot of them from the Rules Committee and we ought to move on.”

But Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was ousted from Republican leadership for criticizing of Trump and was one of only 35 members of her party to back the formation of a commission to investigate the riot, said such a panel was critical.

“It’s really important for us to make sure we have a full investigation into what happened Jan. 6,” she told reporters this week.