“It was a scene of war […] I was slipping blood […]. It was carnage, it was chaos”. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards is standing on the steps of the west facade of the building on January 6, 2021, facing a galvanized and violent crowd. On June 9, 2022, she is seated in front of the nine members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry into the events of January 6. These are his words, which take your breath away. His body, irreparably scarred that day.
Through a careful staging, broadcast at prime time, the commission tries to draw a coherent fresco from the elements it has collected: the existence of a real plan to subvert democracy hatched at the highest of State. The desire to violently eviscerate the American republic. The unacceptable normalization that followed. The grip of far-right forces on public space.
Because January 6 is only the tip of the iceberg. Just like Watergate, writes Garrett M. Graff in his recent book (Watergate: A New History), was only the second act of a trilogy. The comparison is relevant: Watergate exposed a system, a way of thinking about the appropriation of power, a way of exploiting institutional flaws in a polarized period, where “law and order” confronted the counterculture.
A posteriori, it is clear that nothing seemed to be able to stop Nixon. He who told journalist David Frost that when the president acts “it can’t be illegal”. Nor a diplomatic imbroglio (with the Chennault affair, he will seek to undermine the conclusion of a peace agreement in Vietnam to counter the Democratic administration in 1968). Nor electoral sabotage (among his many feats of arms, his team knocked out his Democratic opponent Edmund Muskie during the primary in New Hampshire in 1972 by passing him off as an anti-French Canadian). Nor the fact of resorting to all means to muzzle his opponents – to the point where Attorney General John Mitchell will speak in 1973 of the “House (White) of horrors”.
It must be said that several projects drawn up under the Nixon government send shivers down the spine: enterprises of espionage and sabotage of left-wing extremists, of the pacifist movement, measures endorsed by Nixon in July 1970 and transmitted to the directors of the FBI, CIA and NSA. From the Huston Plan of 1970 (which provided for the possibility of creating detention camps in the western states to incarcerate anti-war demonstrators), the Watergate “plumbers” unit was born. But also a project of attack with the incendiary bomb against the Brookings Institution. The robbery of the psychiatrist’s office of Daniel Ellsberg (the man of the Pentagon Papers on the war in Vietnam).
There is also the creation of a list of “enemies” to be monitored and punished through tax audits. Plans to assassinate reporter Jack Anderson because of his revelations about Nixon’s financial links with gangsterism, about the sale of secret weapons to Pakistan in the midst of the Indo-Pakistani war, or even about the existence of electoral financing illegal (in exchange for substantial benefits) — such as when the dairy industry won an increase in the price of milk, in addition to a stay of prosecution for its anti-competitive practices.
To the point where Watergate has become the standard of political scandals. Except that today, the context is different. Local newspapers—one of the strengths of this counter-power in the early 1970s—are no more than a shadow of themselves. The national channels that existed in 1973 and religiously broadcast parliamentary hearings have been replaced by a fragmented, wired, silo audiovisual landscape. And unlike Watergate, where the pressure was so great that Republicans ended up turning their backs on Nixon, where paleoconservatives like Senator Goldwater convinced the president to throw in the towel, integrity is a rare commodity in the Republicans in 2022. What the choice of the Fox channel not to broadcast the work of the parliamentary committee on January 6 reinforces, moreover.
However, the powers of the commission of inquiry are limited. It cannot indict or convict. But it can act on three levels. First, by exercising a duty of memory, that of recording and bringing together all the elements that culminated on January 6, 2021, and of writing history as it unfolded. Then, by establishing, for the needs of a Department of Justice which will then be able to choose its legal strategies, a direct and immediate link between Trump’s remarks and the abuses on Capitol Hill. Speech that incites imminent illegal action does not enjoy the full protection of the Constitution’s First Amendment… Finally, by seeking to create a shock, to generate a window for political action.
Hence the staging show which will take place over the next few weeks. Because it is less about accountability here than about communication, to reach Americans, prisoners of media silos. And there is urgency.
This window will not be open for long, barely a few summer weeks, until the imminence of the mid-term elections closes it. In this interval, it would be necessary to act quickly, to reform the obsolete Electoral Count Act (the very one which makes it possible to validate the vote of the great electors). Failing to act, explains Professor Rick Hasen, democracy will then be in real danger: the next “January 6” (in 2024, in other words tomorrow) will be more successful, more subtle, more effective, choosing targets (legal vulnerabilities and constitutional) clear.
Especially since the political landscape could be quite different with pro-Trump governors, cantors of the creed ” Stop the Steal at the head of key states, the very ones who can make (or break) the election. History could then prove Ronald Reagan right: the peaceful transfer of power may only be a miracle. It could also prove George Washington right: democracy is a fragile phenomenon that must be protected. At all times.