Since the beginning of the year, the elected members of the American Congress have received more than 9000 threats. Of death, of violence. Torrents of hate. This is nine times more than in 2017, the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency.
That’s what U.S. Capitol Police Chief J. Thomas Manger revealed on Monday. “I cannot overstate the scope, scale and intensity of the current climate of threat in the country,” he told a Senate committee.
Mr. Manger was in the Russell Building, just north of the Capitol, while to the south, in the Cannon Building, a few hundred yards away, was the event of the day, if not the month, in Washington: the final public meeting of the House committee that spent 18 months investigating the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In an attempt to determine whether the 45e United States President Donald Trump did attempt to stage a coup to prevent the handover of power after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
The committee’s nine members — seven Democrats and two Republicans — unanimously recommended that the Justice Department bring criminal charges against former President Trump and a few of his closest aides.
We must emphasize the word “recommend” here, because while parliamentary committees have had the power to investigate a wide range of subjects since the creation of American democracy – including the actions of the executive wing – they do not have absolutely no control over legal proceedings, a power that is in the hands of prosecutors.
This limited jurisdiction did not prevent the committee from putting all the gum to document the events of January 6th and all that led up to this day marked with a black cross in the American calendar.
After hearing more than 1,000 witnesses and reviewing thousands of pages of documents, the committee members believe that legal action should be taken against the former president because, according to their investigation, he took part in a conspiracy to to defraud the American State, would have obstructed an official process of Congress by trying to abort the certification of the election of Joe Biden, would have worked in concert with others to make false declarations, but especially , above all, because he would have called on his supporters to insurrection, to rebel against American democratic institutions.
It’s not nothing. Never has a congressional committee raised such serious charges against a former president of the United States.
Democratic Rep. Elaine Luria described Donald Trump’s alleged role on the fringes of the Jan. 6 assault in one powerful sentence. “He lit the wick, poured gasoline on the fire, sat in the dining room of the White House to watch the fire burn and still today he continues to fan the flames,” summed up the elected official from Virginia at the end of this parliamentary process which often took on the air of a reality show, featuring the entourage of Donald Trump. The assistants invisible to the eyes of the president, just like his close collaborators. Friends and detractors.
Except that unlike The Apprenticethis reality show did not at all depict a Donald Trump in full control of his means, but rather as a victory obsessed ready to do absolutely anything to not lose face, not to lose his kingdom.
Already, attacks are coming from everywhere among Donald Trump’s supporters to discredit the committee’s conclusions. To reduce them to a partisan revenge, even if the most incriminating statements heard during the hearings came from the Trump camp itself.
It remains to be hoped that American justice will be able to keep a cool head and complete its own investigations. That she will be able to make the most of the painstaking work accomplished by the parliamentary committee, while forgetting the spectacle. That it will demonstrate that no one is above the law.
Because it should not be forgotten that while the parliamentary committee was delivering its conclusions, a few hundred meters away, the Capitol police chief was talking about the real consequences, the climate of hatred, stuffed with lies, which has prevailed since the arrival in politics of Donald Trump. Which persists despite his departure.
Lives were lost on January 6, 2021. Lives are still at risk today.