What the January 6th Report Is Missing
Families of the victims, not members of Congress, had demanded the formation of the 9/11 Commission, which consisted of five Democrats and five Republicans (none of whom were current members of Congress). The architects of the report were two professors of history—the commission’s executive director, Philip D. Zelikow, and a senior adviser, Ernest R. May—who had taught courses together and had also collaborated on a book, “The Kennedy Tapes.” May, a Harvard professor (and a colleague of mine until his death, in 2009), wanted to reinvent the genre. “Typically, government reports focus on ‘findings’ and array the evidence accordingly,” he explained. “None, to our knowledge, had ever attempted simply to produce professional-quality narrative history.” This is what May set out to do—he wanted to create “enduringly readable history”—and it’s not only the report’s narrative structure but also its sense of historical time that endows it with both immediacy and lastingness.
The historical narrative is the first eleven chapters of a thirteen-chapter report. There is no two-hundred-page executive summary. There is no executive summary at all, or any list of findings. There is, instead, a taut, three-page preface, and then the story begins, the “story of eccentric and violent ideas sprouting in the fertile ground of political and social turmoil.”
The 9/11 report has plenty of flaws, as May was the first to admit. “For one thing, the report skirts the question of whether American policies and actions fed the anger that manifested itself on September 11,” he wrote in The New Republic in 2005. For another, because some members of the commission and its staff had worked at national-security agencies, “collective drafting led to the introduction of passages that offset criticism of an agency with words of praise. Not all these words were deserved.” Both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush got off even easier than the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the N.S.A. What May was hinting at is illustrated in a thirty-one-page document declassified only this fall, a “memorandum for the record” of a meeting between Bush and the commissioners in which the commissioners repeatedly pressed Bush on whether he knew, in the summer of 2001, about the threat posed by Al Qaeda. Bush said he’d been briefed only about “threats overseas.” This was a lie. He’d been warned about specific threats to the United States. Nowhere in the commission’s final report—released in July, 2004, less than four months before a Presidential election—is the President implicated. If he had been, he might not have been reëlected. “Our aim has not been to assign individual blame,” reads the preface, written by the bipartisan commission’s co-chairs. Instead, they hoped to provide an explanation.
May wanted the 9/11 report to “transcend the passions of the moment,” and it did. He hoped it might serve as a model for future reports. “In these perilous times, there will surely be other events that will require the principles of historiography allied to the resources of government, so that urgency will sometimes become the friend of truth.” This is the bar that was set for members of the January 6th Committee. Their report does not clear that bar. Not because the report isn’t accurate but because it hasn’t achieved escape velocity from the leaden passions of the present.
Here, radically reduced—forty gallons of sap to one gallon of maple syrup—is a very un-executive summary of the report. Donald Trump never said he’d abide by the outcome of the election. In May of 2020, fearing that Biden might win in November, he tweeted, “It will be the greatest Rigged Election in history!” He understood that he would likely lose but that, owing to an effect known as the Red Mirage, it would look, for a while, as if he had won: more Democrats than Republicans would vote by mail and, since mail-in ballots are often the last to be counted, early counting would favor Republicans. “When that happens,” Roger Stone advised him, “the key thing to do is to claim victory. . . . No, we won. Fuck you, Sorry. Over.”
That was Plan A. In September, The Atlantic published a bombshell article by Barton Gellman reporting that the Trump campaign had a scheme “to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.” That was Plan B. Plan A (“Fuck you”) was more Trump’s style. “He’s gonna declare victory,” Steve Bannon said. “But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.” On Election Night, November 3rd, Trump wanted to do just that, but his campaign team persuaded him not to. His patience didn’t last long. “This is a fraud on the American public,” Trump said on November 4th. “We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election.” The next day, he tweeted, “STOP THE COUNT!” On November 7th, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, ABC, the Associated Press, and Fox News all declared that Joseph Biden had won. The election was not close. Counting the votes just took a while.
After Biden won, Trump continued to insist that widespread fraud had been committed. Bill Stepien, Trump’s campaign manager, told the January 6th Committee that the campaign became a “truth telling squad,” chasing allegations, discovering them to be unfounded, and telling the President, “Yeah, that wasn’t true.” The Department of Homeland Security looked into allegations, most of which popped up online, and announced, “There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.” The Justice Department, too, investigated charges of fraud, but, as Barr informed the committee, he was left telling the President, repeatedly, “They’re not panning out.”
For Plan C, the President turned to Rudy Giuliani and a group of lawyers that included Sidney Powell. They filed sixty-two lawsuits challenging election results, and lost all but one of these suits (and that one involved neither allegations of fraud nor any significant number of votes). Twenty-two of the judges who decided these cases had been appointed by Republicans, and ten had been appointed by Trump.
On December 11th, the Supreme Court rejected a suit that had challenged the results in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump had had every right to challenge the results of state elections, but at this point he had exhausted his legal options. He decided to fall back on Plan B, the fake-electors plan, which required hundreds of legislators across the country to set aside the popular vote in states won by Biden, claiming that the results were fraudulent, and appointing their own slate of electors, who would cast their Electoral College votes for Trump on December 14th. According to Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the White House counsel determined that, since none of the fraud allegations had been upheld by any court, the fake-electors plan was illegal. But one deputy assistant to the President told Trump that it didn’t matter whether there had been fraud or not, because “state legislators ‘have the constitutional right to substitute their judgment for a certified majority of their constituents’ if that prevents socialism.”
Plan B required Trump to put pressure on a lot of people. The committee counted at least two hundred attempts he made to influence state or local officials by phone, text, posts, or public remarks. Instructing Trump supporters to join in, Giuliani said, “Sometimes it even requires being threatened.” A Trump-campaign spreadsheet documents efforts to contact more than a hundred and ninety Republican state legislators in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan alone.
Barr resigned. “I didn’t want to be part of it,” he told the committee. Plenty of other people were happy to be part of it, though. Ronna McDaniel, the R.N.C. chair, participated and provided Trump with the assistance of R.N.C. staffers. On December 14th, certified electors met in every state. In seven states that Biden had won—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—fake electors also met and produced counterfeit Electoral College certificates for Trump. Five of these certificates were sent to Washington but were rejected because they lacked the required state seal; two arrived after the deadline. None were accepted.
