Jan 6th. Give them "bread and circuses"

The 1st century Roman poet Juvenal is attributed with the quote "give them bread and circuses and they will never revolt". Pretty astute!

The meaning being if you provide some basic necessities and keep people distracted they won't revolt. It describes how politicians expertly play the blame game to stay in power. Wonder why so many middle eastern dictators spew anti American rhetoric? In nations where the populace lives in poverty, better to have them angry at someone other than the their own corrupt government.

The Democrats certainly don't want people to focus on rising crime, inflation, the previous COVID shutdown records, etc. etc. The modern day "circus" is Jan 6th. Not that Trump didn't play the same game when he was at the helm.

Jan 6th was a bad day in American history and certainly renders Trump unfit to hold future political office. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out and avoid watching hours of Dem produced theater?

Likewise, the Republicans should grow a pair and admit that Trump acted like a horse's in not stepping up to the plate that fateful day.

Jan. 6 Committee Lays Out Case Against Donald Trump in First Public Hearing

Panel presents witnesses, video clips and previously unseen footage in bid to connect dots to the former president

Rep. Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), one of just two Republicans on the House panel investigating the Capitol riot, laid out the evidence the committee plans to present in the course of the hearings, including what she called President Trump’s lack of action to stop the riot on Jan. 6, 2021.

By Scott Patterson, WSJ

Updated June 10, 2022

WASHINGTON—The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol held a prime-time session Thursday evening aimed at convincing a divided nation that former President Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election incited his followers to try to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power.

The hearing, shown on cable television and most major broadcast outlets, was the first in a series scheduled over the next two weeks. It laid out the committee’s vision of the attack on the Capitol as a watershed historical moment for American democracy and a red alarm for threats it could face in the future.

Backers of Mr. Trump, including most Republican lawmakers, said the committee’s approach miscasts the day’s events and rejected the hearings as a political ploy by Democrats.

Speaking from a hearing room in a congressional office building, part of the complex that a mob of pro-Trump supporters attacked a year and a half ago, Vice Chairman Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.) sought to connect the dots between actions taken by Mr. Trump and his campaign and the mob that stormed the Capitol.

“Over a series of hearings in the coming weeks, you will hear testimony, live and on video, from more than a half dozen former Trump White House staff, all of whom were in the West Wing of the White House that day,” said Ms. Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel, in her wide-ranging opening statement.

Ms. Cheney said testimony indicated that Mr. Trump was repeatedly told by top campaign and administration officials that he had lost the 2020 election. Mr. Trump’s attorney general, William Barr, told the committee that he repeatedly told the president “in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud, you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election,” according to video testimony played by the committee.

Play video: Watch: Jan. 6 Committee Plays Never-Before-Seen Video of Capitol Attack

The House select committee investigating the Capitol riot played a video compilation in its first of several hearings, including never-before-seen footage of rioters breaching the Capitol and officers bracing for the assault. Photo: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Ms. Cheney played video testimony in which Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, said hearing that Mr. Barr didn’t believe there was evidence of widespread voter fraud “affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”

Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, said in videotaped testimony that he was aware of talk from White House counsel Pat Cipollone and other lawyers that they were considering resigning over the president’s actions, but that he considered it “whining.”

Ms. Cheney also pointed to Mr. Trump’s inaction on Jan. 6. “You will hear testimony that ‘the president didn’t really want to put anything out’ calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave,” she said.

“Aware of the rioters’ chants to ‘hang Mike Pence,’ the president responded with this sentiment: ‘maybe our supporters have the right idea,’” Ms. Cheney said.

The Wyoming Republican also said it was then-Vice President Mike Pence, not Mr. Trump, who called for the military to defend the U.S. Capitol during the riot.

Mr. Trump “placed no call to any element of the U.S. government to instruct that the Capitol be defended,” Ms. Cheney said.

Committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) sought to strike a bipartisan tone in his opening remarks.

“The Constitution doesn’t protect just Democrats or just Republicans,” he said. “It protects all of us: ‘We the People.’ And this scheme was an attempt to undermine the will of the people.”

“The conspiracy to thwart the will of the people is not over,” he said, in a nod to the committee’s plans to make recommendations for legislative steps to protect democracy from future threats.

A year after pro-Trump rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol, lawmakers and Americans remain divided over what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, and who is to blame. WSJ journalists look at changes in Congress since then, and what it could mean for the 2022 midterm elections. Photos: Getty Images (1/6/22)

“January 6th was the culmination of an attempted coup,” Mr. Thompson said in his opening remarks.

Republicans have called the committee’s probe a partisan witch hunt and a distraction from issues such as high gasoline prices and crime.

House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.) attacked the Jan. 6 select committee in a press conference Thursday, calling it “the most political and least legitimate committee in American history.”

Mr. Trump has denied any responsibility or wrongdoing related to the attack. After the hearing the former president posted to his social-media platform that the “unselect committee” had refused to highlight his allegations of a fraudulent election, which have been found to be unsubstantiated by numerous courts. Mr. Trump’s supporters denounced the two-hour hearing as partisan theater, focusing heavily on the idea that Democrats had failed to prepare the Capitol for that day’s security concerns.

The committee, comprising seven Democrats and two Republicans who have broken with Mr. Trump, is expected to continue to deploy a combination of video, audio and live testimony to lay out its take on the day’s events.

Five further hearings are scheduled over the next two weeks, but only the last one, set for June 23, will also be held in prime time.

The panel is expected to release a final report of its findings in the fall. The next hearing is scheduled for 10 a.m. Eastern time on Monday, followed by hearings on Wednesday and Thursday. Two more hearings follow over the next week.

Caroline Edwards, a Capitol Police officer, was one of two witnesses to speak directly from the hearing room.

Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who was injured during the Jan. 6 riot, testified at a House panel investigating the attack. Asked about the most harrowing part of the day, she described chaos and recalled slipping in people’s blood. Photo: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

“I was called Nancy Pelosi’s dog, called incompetent, called a hero, and a villain,” she said. “I was called a traitor to my country, my oath, and my Constitution. In actuality, I was none of those things. I was an American standing face to face with other Americans asking myself many times, many, many times, how we had gotten here.”

Ms. Edwards, who was injured and left unconscious in the early moments of the attack, described the violent attacks from rioters outside the Capitol. “It was carnage, it was chaos,” she said, likening the scene that day to a war zone, with “hours of hand-to-hand combat.”

How should people who participated in the Jan. 6 riot be held accountable? Join the conversation below.

The other witness who appeared in person at the hearing was Nick Quested, a British documentarian who filmed members of the right-wing group Proud Boys in the days leading up to Jan. 6 and the day itself.

Mr. Quested was present as members of the Proud Boys allegedly assaulted Capitol Police officers in the early moments of the attack. One Proud Boys member present at the time was Joseph Biggs, who earlier this week was charged with seditious conspiracy by a grand jury for his role in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol alongside four other members of the extremist group. Mr. Biggs and two other onetime Proud Boy members pleaded not guilty to those charges on Thursday.

Proud Boys members including Joseph Biggs, in plaid shirt, who has been charged with seditious conspiracy for his role in the attack, walking toward the Capitol before the riot last year.

Ms. Edwards said she was near Officer Brian Sicknick, who died a day after the riot, when he was sprayed with a chemical. “He was ghostly pale, which I figured at that point that he had been sprayed and I was concerned,” she said. The medical examiner found in April 2021 that Mr. Sicknick died a natural death.

“It’s unfortunate that you had to defend the Capitol from fellow Americans,” Mr. Thompson told Ms. Edwards.