(Headline USA) The opportunities for the House’s partisan Jan. 6 committee to fulfill its goal of impacting the November midterm election are beginning to wane.
Even with its two so-called Republicans, Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, both having abandoned hope for re-election, now openly shilling and offering to campaign for Democrats, committee members have struggled to make their topic part of the narrative in a substantive way.
Economic concerns and other conservative-friendly issues like immigration dominate the list of the most important national problems to address, while most Democrats are hitching their wagon to abortion as the most important issue to drive voters to the polls.
Despite its shocking, high-profile threats to compel people to comply with its subpoenas, the committee has failed to deliver on any show-stopping moments that would justify the level of attention it seeks.
Amid the general disarray in which it finds itself, the committee—which planned to hold what was likely to be its final investigative hearing Wednesday afternoon—used a hurricane in Florida as its excuse to buy more time, perhaps delivering an October surprise to stem the tide of a widely anticipated Republican red wave.
“We’re praying for the safety of all those in the storm’s path,” committee chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a joint statement with Cheney on Tuesday afternoon. “The Select Committee’s investigation goes forward and we will soon announce a date for the postponed proceedings.”
Hurricane Ian was expected to make landfall in Florida late Wednesday evening, meaning voters in the swing state may not be able to direct their complete attention to the hearings.
However, the lawmakers themselves were in no great peril, with the storm expected to slow into a Category 1 by Thursday as it moved across the northern part of the Sunshine state, bringing only heavy rain up the Atlantic seaboard into the weekend.
The committee had not yet provided a specific agenda for the Wednesday hearing, but Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., said over the weekend it would “tell the story about a key element of Donald Trump’s plot to overturn the election.”
On Monday, though, it was revealed that one of the key witnesses the committee hoped to call, Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos, could not sit for a deposition given the short notice that he had received. Vos filed a lawsuit challenging the subpoena instead.
Thus far, the committee has interviewd more than 1,000 witnesses—a number of them Trump’s closest allies, including members of his own family—but has failed to yield sufficient evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow the election.
But the committee has said its work isn’t done.
During the August recess, congressional investigators continued to interview witnesses, including several of Trump’s cabinet members, some of whom had discussed invoking the constitutional process in the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.
Cheney had previously said the committee “has far more evidence to share with the American people and more to gather.”
The committee wants to get to the bottom of missing Secret Service texts from Jan. 5-6, 2021, which could shed further light on Trump’s actions. Thompson said earlier this month that the committee has recently obtained “thousands” of documents from the Secret Service.
The committee has also secured an interview with conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, who’s married to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She contacted lawmakers in Arizona and Wisconsin as part of that the effort to challenge the outcome in states where widespread ballot irregularities were evident.
The committee is expected to turn over a comprehensive report by the end of the year that will include legislative reforms, although it remains to be seen whether a Republican-led Congress would take up any of its proposals.
Adapted from reporting by the Associated Press
