Top Democrat says Capitol riot hearings are going to be like Watergate

A member of the House committee investigating the January 6 insurrection says to expect daily, Watergate-style hearings of the panel that will be public for all Americans to see throughout 2022, the worst-case scenario for many Republicans.

Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland made the comments in an interview with All in with Chris Hayes, guest hosted by Medhi Hasan, on MSNBC on Monday evening.

“We'll tell the story of each dimension of this attack on American democracy. The American people have not yet seen all of the evidence laid out in this way. So we're going to have hearings for the American people, which I hope will seem somewhat like the Watergate hearings did, in that they will be a daily occurrence so people can follow the unfolding narrative,” he told the news network.

“[W]e'll give America a report and Congress a report about what happened and what we need to do to strengthen our resiliency against future authoritarian attacks like this,” he added.

The comments preview a 2022 that unfolds very much in the way Republicans clearly feared when they sought to resist all attempts to form a bipartisan commission on the issue of investigating the attack on Congress throughout 2021. A bill establishing such a special commission was defeated in the Senate last year in the face of near-unified GOP opposition, but the move appears to have done little to blunt the efforts of the House, controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to follow through with promises for a full investigation.

Republicans may even be at somewhat of a disadvantage thanks to the decision of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy to pull all of his nominees to the select committee from consideration after two members of the House were rejected by Ms Pelosi for membership; one, Rep Jim Jordan, is now officially a target of the panel itself, and the other, Rep Jim Banks, has spread misinformation about the attack as well as the committee itself.

That decision left the select committee with just two Republicans, Reps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, both of whom have shown outright hostility to Mr McCarthy’s attempts to delay or hamper the effort to investigate January 6.

Mr Raskin on Monday told Mr Hasan that his fellow lawmakers have not decided on the fate of Mr Jordan as well as other members of the House who, like the Ohio Republican, spurn the committee’s voluntary requests for interviews or information. Rep Bennie Thompson, the committee’s chair, has left open the possibility of issuing congressional subpoenas.

"The committee has not yet decided what to do about different levels of interference and noncooperation that we have received from various witnesses," said Mr Raskin.

“We don't want to get pulled down into some wild goose chases. On the other hand, everybody has a responsibility to comply with congressional orders when it comes to an investigation, and nobody knows that better than Mark Meadows or Jim Jordan, people who in the Benghazi investigation or any number of other investigations against Democratic presidents, insisted upon absolute compliance,” added the congressman, who said that the committee would be required to show “tactical nimbleness” when dealing with fellow members of Congress.

Panel members are hoping to release a report detailing all or some of their findings by the summer, a move that could hurt Republicans efforts to retake the House and Senate in the 2022 midterms as voters will be subjected to daily reminders of the GOP’s role in the lies about the 2020 election that led to the attack on the Capitol.

The Watergate hearings of the early 1970s electrified an international TV audience as it laid bare a scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign as president before he could be impeached.