NBC News committed a random act of journalism on Tuesday, interviewing the chief investigator for the January 6th committee, and the revelations were astounding.
Without trying to sound hyperbolic, what Tim Heaphy says to Lester Holt may be the most significant admission regarding January 6th since the attack took place. Previously, surveillance videos had revealed how complicated and confusing the situation was, but according to Heaphy, the attack was preventable before the first person stepped foot on the Capitol grounds.
Further, according to Holt, committee members like Liz Cheney and Adam Schiff purposely suppressed that damning information in the final report in order to keep the focus solely on Donald Trump. In other words, the committee put politics above exposing the avoidable failures of federal law enforcement that occurred.
HEAPHY: I think it would have been a lot different had law enforcement taken a more assertive, protective posture. The intel in advance was pretty specific, and it was enough, in our view, for law enforcement to have done a better job operationalizing a secure perimeter.
(NARRATION)
HEAPHY: Law enforcement had a very direct role in contributing to the failures, the security failures that led to the violence.
Heaphy reveals that the intelligence prior to January 6th was direct and not ambiguous. The FBI knew that people were going to attempt to get inside the Capitol Building. Still, instead of trying to prevent the attack, recent revelations showed that the FBI played along, having informants within the Proud Boys organization.
The question is why? Obviously, we all have our opinions, but it at least seems as if the government wanted things to escalate on January 6th in order to harm Trump and the Republican Party politically. That’s the only explanation for the FBI and the Capitol Police not being prepared to deal with a violent protest they knew was going to happen.
Perhaps the government agencies involved thought they could let things go a certain distance to get the PR they wanted, and then things just got out of control. Whatever happened, it’s clear by the admission of the January 6th committee’s own top investigator that federal law enforcement failed to act on the intelligence it had.
Just as damning of a revelation in the report is the fact that committee members actively covered up those law enforcement failures in order to continue their partisan pursuit of Trump.
REPORTER: People familiar with the committee’s work tell NBC News [that] members downplayed that findings because they wanted to keep the focus on former President Trump.
As many have pointed out in relation to the January 6th committee, the only constitutional role its members actually had was to assess the failures of government agencies. That is Congress’ power of oversight, but instead of doing that, the committee members ignored that element altogether, leaving reams of damning evidence on the cutting room floor presented by investigators.
The behavior of the January 6th committee was downright scandalous, and there must be a reckoning now that Republicans are back in charge. Every bit of internal deliberation needs to be made public, and there should be a new committee appointed that actually delves into the areas Liz Cheney and her cohorts refused to analyze because they were so obsessed with getting Donald Trump. Little by little, the truth is going to come out.