WASHINGTON — Beginning in prime time on Thursday, the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol is setting out to establish the historical record of an event damaging not only to a community or individual families but to the collective idea of democracy itself.After more than 100 subpoenas, 1,000 interviews and 100,000 documents, the committee has a story to tell in hearings that open this week. The open question: How much will the country care?The committee’s examination of the actions of President Trump and all the president’s men and women, more aggressive than any inquiry before it, has produced a multitude of plot lines that together will tell the tale of a violent protest fueled by the venom of a defeated president.Many Republicans, even those who condemned Mr. Trump and the violence in the moment, have adopted a “nothing more to see here” posture since, even rejecting calls for an independent Sept. 11-style commission to investigate.Rather than condemn the attack, Mr. Trump continues to insist his defeat by 7 million votes should be overturned, in effect validating the rioters’ cause.Dozens of the protesters have been brought to justice, many of them being convicted or pleading guilty to serious crimes. But the committee’s goal is larger: Who in a position of power should also be held to account?There are endless ribbons of inquiry.Did Vice President Pence refuse to leave the besieged Capitol because he suspected the Secret Service, at the behest of Mr. Trump, was trying to take him away to stop him from certifying President Biden’s victory? Did Mr. Trump flush incriminating papers down the White House toilet?How to explain the gap of more than seven hours in White House telephone logs of Mr. Trump’s calls during the attack? Will it stand in history alongside the infamous 18 1/2-minute hole in President Nixon’s secret White House recording system in 1972?The Watergate affair, which exposed Nixon’s cover-up of politically motivated criminal acts and destroyed his presidency, centered on a question posed by a Republican senator, Howard Baker, in a Tennessee drawl: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?”For the January 6 committee, the key question about Mr. Trump’s involvement is: What did the president do, and when did he do it?One aim is to establish whether Mr. Trump’s acts are criminal, as one judge has mused they may be, and whether that would prompt a politically fraught Justice Department prosecution of an ex-president.More broadly, the effort addresses who might be punished in the large circle of Trump enablers. Some of them are members of Congress who reportedly helped him plot how to try to overturn the election only to huddle in fear with everyone else in a Capitol hideout when the rioters — in service of that plot — swarmed the marbled corridors of power on January 6.The prime-time setting for the committee hearing is a rarity and something of a throwback to an era when people gathered en masse at their televisions in the evening before video streaming atomized viewership.Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat on the committee, set expectations that may be hard to meet as the committee tries to renew the interest of this short-attention-span country in events that are nearly 18 months in the rearview mirror.The hazards in that mirror are closer than they appear, as committee members see it.“The hearings will tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House,” Mr. Raskin said in April. “Because it is a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offense ever organized by a president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States.”That offense? In short, he told a Washington forum, “an inside coup” coupled with a violent attack by “neo-fascists.”Mr. Trump is not expected at any of the hearings, but his words and actions will hang heavily over the proceedings as lawmakers look to place him at the center of the chaos. The committee almost certainly will look to draw a tight connection between Mr. Trump’s vociferous rejections of the election results and his January 6 rally outside the White House sending the angry crowd off to Capitol Hill.Free from the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, committee members are likely to try to show that the riot that ravaged the Capitol was not a spontaneous gathering but part of a broader conspiracy and a natural outgrowth of weeks of denunciations of democratic processes.Whatever revelations the hearings may produce, much is already known because the attack played out on screens large and small in real time, and Trump exhorted supporters to “fight like hell” in shouts for the world to hear.“In quieter times, the hearings would have a stronger hold on public attention,” said the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communications. “But, as is, they will be competing for attention with topics with greater immediate relevance in our lives.”“If the hearings are to do anything other than reinforce our existing political biases,” she said, “they will have to reveal previously covered-up goings-on that threatened something that Democrats, independents and most Republicans can agree should be sacrosanct.”Some of the inquiry’s juicy bits are out already. Text messages and emails, thought to be private when sent, have become public, including from chief of staff Mark Meadows.But the committee has been sitting on much more information and will have tens of thousands of exhibits and hundreds of witnesses, said Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee chairman.January 6 shares certain distinctions with other past agonies. As with 9/11, you can shorthand the date, January 6, and people know. Like Watergate, it speaks to accusations of corrupt acts in the highest office. As with the Challenger space shuttle explosion and 9/11 and more, the scene brought so much visceral shock that many people remember where they were and what they were doing when they saw it.As far as the far right is concerned, the historical analogy is the Boston Tea Party, with liberals, Democrats and the Washington establishment as the redcoats.Trump-friendly Republicans sanitized what happened that day, once the shock that nearly all felt on January 6 subsided. In measurements of public opinion, Republican voters in the main said they believe the 2020 election was rigged, even as the courts, nonpartisan and even Republican state officials, and the Trump administration’s own election monitors, including his attorney general, found the election was fair.A year later, the protest was remembered as very or extremely violent by fewer than 4 in 10 Republicans polled, compared with almost 9 in 10 Democrats.Even so, there were signs in the latest Republican primaries for the 2022 midterms that Mr. Trump’s obsession about getting fired by the voters all those months ago is wearing thin even with them.Still he holds sway over his party, thanks to supporters whose loyalty seems immovable. They are unlikely to be easily dislodged by a congressional committee’s findings.
