Message to justice department: Step it up

While a sizable population holds fast to the view that the Committee is illegitimate and is engaging in a witch hunt, with each public hearing, the size of this group is eroding, and attitudes are changing. Not fast enough.

Initially, I was skeptical that the Committee would offer up anything that we didn’t really know if we had been paying attention. Still, the details made public about information that Trump had been receiving from his inner circle of advisors and his responses to that information has been invaluable. Critics of the Committee have complained about the Committee’s makeup; but that criticism notwithstanding, the Committee has done an incredible service in shining a light on these backstage goings on, in large part due to testimony provided almost exclusively by Republican witnesses. The full story, however, is still being shielded by the handful of Trump loyalists who’ve continued to resist cooperating with the Committee. Their testimony, under oath, is critical to the historical record; and without this testimony, their off-the-record denials and obfuscations will continue to serve as justification for a still too-large group of Trump stalwarts to stick to their guns (in some cases, literally).

Either the January 6th Select Committee is legitimate or it’s not. A growing majority of Americans think that it is, but this sense of legitimacy does not yet seem to have affected the Justice Department. Although it seems clear that criminal investigations by the Justice Department have begun, the Department appears to have turned a blind eye to the fact that a collection of Republican politicians and Trump insiders have received Congressional subpoenas and have chosen to disregard them.

The Committee and the public needs to hear, firsthand and under oath, from Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan, Scott Perry, Andy Biggs, and Mo Brooks. All have been implicated in involvement with either the planning or execution of the effort to subvert the election; all have been subpoenaed; and all have refused to cooperate. Four of the five of these men are currently sitting members of Congress, which makes their testimony particularly important — not only for the public record, but also because their participation in Congress may be in violation of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment. This section authorizes Congress to remove any Senator or Representative from office who had participated in an “insurrection or rebellion” against the government. Testimony from these individuals is critical for Congress to be able to appropriately exercise its constitutional duty.

Thus far, the Justice Department has abetted the silence of the above-mentioned individuals. As of yet, the Department has seen fit to indict only two people who have defied this Committee’s subpoenas — neither of which hold seats in Congress: Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro. Why stop there? If the Committee has the power to issue subpoenas, the Justice Department should take a consistent and uniform approach to backing up that authority. The Department’s disparate responses to renegade actions by elected representatives as compared to actions taken with respect to non-elected officials is hard to fathom, as it fosters the appearance of unequal treatment under the law. The Justice Department needs to address this perception, and it needs to do so expeditiously.