Mrvan hopes hearings prevent repeat of Jan. 6
As the Jan. 6 House Committee begins holding hearings to present its findings on the 2021 insurrection, U.S. Rep Frank Mrvan, D-Highland, said he hopes the committee has found solutions to prevent a similar attack from taking place while area Republicans signaled they have moved on from the insurrection.
The House panel investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol has laid the blame firmly on Donald Trump, saying the assault was not spontaneous but an “attempted coup” and a direct result of the defeated president’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.
The committee has interviewed more than 1,000 people who were directly or indirectly involved in the U.S. Capitol insurrection. Several
will return for a series of public hearings that started Thursday as the committee begins to present its findings to the public.
The riot left more than 100 police officers injured, many beaten and bloodied, as the crowd of pro-Trump rioters, some armed with pipes, bats and bear spray, charged into the Capitol. At least nine people who were there died during and after the rioting, including a woman who was shot and killed by police.
With a new 12-minute video showing extremist groups leading the deadly siege and startling testimony from Trump’s inner circle, the Jan. 6 committee provided gripping detail Thursday night in contending that Trump’s repeated lies about election fraud and his public effort to stop President Joe Biden’s victory led to the attack and imperiled American democracy.
“Jan. 6 was the culmination of an attempted coup, a brazen attempt, as one rioter put it shortly after Jan. 6, to overthrow the government,” said the panel’s chair, Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss. “The violence was no accident.”
Testimony on Thursday showed how Trump desperately clung to his own false claims of election fraud, beckoning supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Congress would certify the results, despite those around him insisting Biden had won the election.
In a previously unseen video clip, the panel played a remark from former Attorney General Bill Barr, who testified that he told Trump the claims of a rigged election were “bull----.”
In another clip, the former president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, testified to the committee that she respected Barr’s view that there was no election fraud. “I accepted what he said.”
Others showed leaders of the extremist Oath Keepers and Proud Boys preparing to storm the Capitol to stand up for Trump. One rioter after another told the committee they came to the Capitol because Trump asked them to.
“President Trump summoned a violent mob,” said Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the panel’s vice chair who took the lead for much of the hearing. “When a president fails to take the steps necessary to preserve our union — or worse, causes a constitutional crisis — we’re in a moment of maximum danger for our republic.”
There was a gasp in the hearing room when Cheney read an account that said when Trump was told rioters were chanting for then-Vice President Mike Pence to be hanged for refusing to block the election results Trump responded that maybe they were right, that he “deserves it.”
Police officers who had fought off the mob consoled one another as they sat in the committee room reliving the violence they faced on Jan. 6. Officer Harry Dunn teared up as body camera footage showed rioters bludgeoning his colleagues with flagpoles and baseball bats.
In wrenching testimony U.S. Capitol Police Officer Caroline Edwards told the panel that she slipped in other people’s blood as rioters pushed past her into the Capitol. She suffered brain injuries in the melee.
“It was carnage. It was chaos,” she said.
On his fourth day as a member
of Congress, Mrvan was escorted out of the House chambers and held in an undisclosed location as the insurrection unfolded. While in the undisclosed location, Mrvan told the Post-Tribune that as he was escorted out his first thought was “words matter.”
Mrvan said constituents have been reaching out to him about the hearings and the underlying concern is preventing a similar event from taking place and presenting the facts.
As the hearings continue, Mrvan said he hopes the outcome of the hearings “should be how do we prevent anything like this from happening in the future” while exposing the fragility of Democracy and the transfer of power from one president to another.
“We are two political parties but we’re one nation under God, and I mean that wholeheartedly. We have to start chipping away at what divides us and really work together on what brings us together as a nation,” he said.
Jennifer-Ruth Green, Mrvan’s Republican challenger in November, said in a statement that Jan. 6 “was a dark day for America.” Her statement did not state if she watched Thursday’s hearing.
Green said “everyone who engaged in illegal conduct that day should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” but stated that the “committee is looking to divide Americans” and distract from the challenges people are facing, like crime, inflation and surging gas and grocery prices.
“I want to look to the future and advance common sense policies to solve problems and bring America together,” Green said.
Lake County Republican Chairman Dan Dernulc said he did not watch the hearing because he’s “an extremely busy guy.”
“I really have no desire to watch them. They’re a bit skewed. I don’t know they’re looking for,” Dernulc said.
Based on what he heard about the hearings Friday, Dernulc said he believes he “made the right decision not to watch.”
Dernulc said he lost faith in the committee when U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, R-Indiana, was denied a seat on the committee. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she barred Banks and Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, from the panel based on Democrats’ concerns about their “statements made and actions taken” around the insurrection.
People shouldn’t be barred from committees for having different views, Dernulc said, because that behavior is “ruining our country.”
Porter County Republican Party Chairman Michael Simpson said he did not watch the hearing because he was “otherwise engaged.” Simpson said he read a little bit about the hearing in the newspaper Friday, but he didn’t have a response to what he read.
Congress should be focused on issues like inflation and “less on stuff that happened 18 months ago,” which the Department of Justice is addressing, he said.
“We’re busy in the middle of campaign season,” Simpson said. “Looking forward, not backwards.”