Promise of Jan. 6 accountability still unfulfilled

At midnight on Jan. 6, 2021, a good 12 hours before the eruption of historic violence for which the date lives in fresh infamy, the column I submitted for this website began like this:

BREAKING: The United States.

That's it; that's the lede.

OK, no one wants to be told their country is crumbling, but when Peaceful Transfer of Power Day arrives as scheduled on Jan. 6 and the mayor of the nation's capital is requesting hundreds of National Guardsmen, maybe you're a tad anxious that this little unofficial holiday tradition is going to hold up.

The truth is, I wrote that hoping to be dead wrong. I was hoping the worst impulses of an inflamed narcissist who'd lost the election would not rise to the level of violence against the Constitution, against democracy, against America, even against his own lickspittle vice president, who finally and reluctantly certified Joe Biden's victory nearly four hours after midnight had come again.

In the sickening interim, Mike Pence was threatened with hanging, more than 140 people were injured, five were killed, and four others among the responding law enforcement units were pushed toward eventual suicide.

One year out from it, Donald Trump chuckles on, as ever, above the law for going on 50 years. Trump's last chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has his thumb permanently stuck to the end of his nose. Steve Bannon, the heavyweight champion of poisonous Trump influencers and Jan. 6 architects ("All hell is gonna break loose tomorrow. ... So many people have said, 'If I was a revolution, I would be in Washington. Well, this is your time in history."), is at least indicted, but it hasn't diminished his enjoyment of watching democracy stagger from his blows.

You can honorably argue here at the birth of 2022 that the climate and the virus are bigger stories than the implications and tedious adjudication of those events from a year ago this week, but I would say that this — the Evanescence of Democracy — will be the most important story in a year that's not a week old.

Jocelyn Benson, the Democratic secretary of state in Michigan who oversaw the vote count there in 2020, told The New York Times in December, "This is a five-alarm fire; if people in general, leaders and citizens, aren't taking this as the most important issue of our time and acting accordingly, we may not be able to ensure democracy prevails in '24."

That's because in swing states where Republicans run the legislature — Georgia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and dear old Pennsylvania — Trump allies are either systematically suppressing the vote, strategically positioning the election administrators, or both. In Lancaster County, Jan. 6 attendee and Trump supporter Stephen Lindemuth ran for judge of elections and won.

The immediate exigency is that while some 700 people have been charged in the riot, most of those sentenced, 71 as of this writing, have gotten little or no jail time. The most severe sentence so far has been 63 months, but anyone who feels the 2020 election was stolen — a notion since disproven 100 different ways including by Trump's own lap dog attorney general — or would merely like to steal the next one, is not cowed in the least by the U.S. House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, nor by any action taken thus far by the Justice Department.

The Committee has heard from some 300 witnesses, examined thousands of documents, and promises in 2022 to eventually — watch out now! — issue a couple of reports.

For the moment, the nine members continue to sound less like the group that will hold any of the riot's planners or financiers responsible and more like an earnest little bunch working on a master's thesis.

Whatever they produce, you can be sure it won't be widely read, most particularly by the inveterate nonreader who was the 45th President of the United States. The irony is, examining thousands of documents or more is nice, but Trump is the equivalent of an open book when it comes to Jan. 6.

"They're not taking this White House," he blurted in the hours leading to that day. "We're gonna fight like hell."

Most all of this happened in plain sight in broad daylight.

Mr. Trump summoned his supporters to Washington on the day the electoral votes were to be counted ("be there ... gonna be wild!"), he sent them to the Capitol ("If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore"), and he sat quaffing Diet Cokes while the fighting went on for more than three hours on his TV.

It's not as if some criminal mastermind has meticulously woven a sinister veil of deceit and mystery here. Yet as this week began, Committee chair Bennie Thompson of Mississippi was telling ABC, "If, in the course of our review, we find something we think warrants review or recommendation to the Department of Justice, to be honest with you, we will do it."

If?

"We are not looking for it, but if we find it, we will absolutely make the referral (for criminal prosecution)."

Not looking for it? See, I thought the whole point was, you know, to look for it.

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday spoke about Jan. 6 and, as officials at the Justice Department put it before the speech, would reaffirm "the department's unwavering commitment to defend Americans and American democracy from violence and threats of violence."

That unwavering commitment will almost look legitimate when someone brings the handcuffs.