There is no actual question about the person primarily responsible for the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Had President Donald Trump simply acknowledged his loss on Nov. 7 when it became obvious that he had no path to victory, had he recognized the reality of his defeat, the next few weeks would have been fairly quiet. States would have certified their votes without fanfare. Electors would have participated in the traditional formality of casting their votes with the same sort of model-U.N. nerdiness that usually accompanies the act. And on Jan. 6, Congress would have met, counted those votes and adjourned with barely any notice.
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But Trump didn’t acknowledge his loss. He’d spent months laying a foundation of doubt with his base about the reliability of the votes that were cast in November and, through some combination of stubbornness, pride and delusion, insisted for weeks that the election had been somehow stolen (which, of course, it wasn’t) and, more important, that there was some mechanism available to steal it back. He encouraged people to believe these false claims and, as Jan. 6 approached, encouraged his supporters to come to Washington to manifest their anger. (“It will be wild!” he promised on Twitter.) That morning, he repeatedly told the thousands of people at his rally near the White House that they needed to fight and that they should go to the Capitol. And they did.
None of this is in dispute or disputable. The Jan. 6 riot happened because of Trump’s words and actions. Without his encouragement, without his recruitment, without his dishonesty, there’s no mob at the Capitol and no tidal wave of people able to push past the Capitol Police and the D.C. police to get into the building. But because Trump is still the star around which the Republican Party orbits, his party has had to try to figure out a way to cast blame for the insurrection elsewhere.
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On Tuesday morning, shortly before the first hearing of the House committee formed to investigate the violence on Jan. 6, Republican leaders held a brief news conference outside the Capitol in which they identified another culprit for what occurred: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).
As Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the party’s former conference chair, prepared to participate in the hearing, the woman now holding that leadership position — after Cheney’s ouster for criticizing Trump’s role in the riot — attacked Pelosi in hyperbolic terms.
“There is a reason that Nancy Pelosi is the most disliked elected official in America,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.). “She always puts her own partisan politics over what’s best for the American people. She’s an authoritarian who has broken the people’s house.”
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Stefanik later added: “The American people deserve to know the truth, that Nancy Pelosi bears responsibility as speaker of the House for the tragedy that occurred on January 6.”
This assertion is unfounded, if not absurd, both in the abstract and the specifics.
The theory of the case is that Pelosi failed to take steps to ensure security at the Capitol that day. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), one of the lawmakers nominated to serve on the committee by House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) who was rejected by Pelosi, put it as follows during the news conference: “Why don’t they want to answer the fundamental question, which is why wasn’t there a better security posture on that day?”
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“When you spend a year talking about defunding the police and actually defund the police,” Jordan later added, “it’s kind of hard to have more police here on January 6 like they should have done.”
Police officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 testified before Congress on July 27 about their experiences. (Blair Guild/The Washington Post)
This argument, though, has been adjudicated repeatedly, including by The Washington Post’s fact-checking team. Jordan has repeatedly claimed that Pelosi declined to authorize sufficient levels of protection at the Capitol, an assertion that depends on the idea that there was a shared sense of danger that led to Pelosi being presented with a request for action. But there’s no evidence that this is what happened.
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It is very much the case that a number of warning signs about the threat that day were missed. As early as mid-December, there were indications that disruptions were possible. The number of external threats being tracked increased as the day itself approached, but none seem to have registered as representing the actual threat that emerged that day.
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The claim that Pelosi bears responsibility hinges on two assertions: that the Capitol Police asked the House sergeant-at-arms to request National Guard backup for the day, without assent, and that the sergeant-at-arms reports to Pelosi’s office. At the time, the sergeant-at-arms was Paul D. Irving, who claimed that he was concerned about the “optics” of such a presence.
As The Post’s fact-checkers explain, though, it was not Irving’s decision alone whether the National Guard should be stationed at the Capitol, nor is there evidence that Pelosi was involved in evaluating that question. (“We are not involved in the day-to-day operations of that office at all,” a representative of Pelosi’s office said. “We expect security professionals to make security decisions.”) Some critics of Pelosi have claimed that Irving believed that Pelosi would object to the visual message sent by having troops at the Capitol, but, in congressional testimony, Irving denied that.
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In other words, even in the specific effort to pin security failures on Pelosi, there’s not much to work with. But in the abstract, blaming Jan. 6 on Pelosi is far more ridiculous. It’s like saying that the reason a wildfire burned down 500 homes and destroyed 50,000 acres is because the town’s mayor failed to intervene and demand that the fire department call up additional volunteers — and that this failure was more important than the gender-reveal party that set off pink-colored fireworks in a desiccated forest.
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In politics, you work with what you’ve got. And what Republicans have is a former president who still has a stranglehold on their voters and who continues to promote baseless claims of voter fraud that have gone unchallenged for more than half a year. So House leaders try to redirect blame to Pelosi, knowing that, often, a bit of whataboutism goes a long way.
But, of course, the party does have other tools: It has complaints about socialism and cancel culture, as House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) used in disparaging Pelosi’s decision to reject two of McCarthy’s proposed committee nominees.
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“Maybe because they were raising those questions,” Scalise said of Jordan and Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.), “they got canceled by this new cancel culture that we see moving throughout the country, led by Speaker Pelosi and a lot of our socialist allies here in Congress where they want to shut out voices that raise tough questions that they don’t want to be asked or answered.”
A clip that will no doubt find some favor on Fox News.