The House select committee examining Jan. 6 appears increasingly focused on a highly consequential question: What did Donald Trump say and do as he watched the violent assault on the Capitol unfold over the course of at least two hours?
This is high-stakes stuff. Jordan, a ubiquitous, ranting presence all over right-wing media and one of the Trumpiest of Republicans, was apparently neck-deep in the effort to thwart the transfer of power, including reported scheming over how to subvert the count of presidential electors in Congress.
Jordan has conceded that he spoke to Trump at least once on Jan. 6. Here’s what the committee’s letter to Jordan says in requesting an interview with him:
We understand that you had at least one and possibly multiple communications with President Trump on January 6th. We would like to discuss each such communication with you in detail.
On Dec. 21, 2020, Jordan reportedly met with Trump loyalists in Congress who developed a scheme for overturning Joe Biden’s electors during the Jan. 6 congressional count. On Jan. 5, Jordan circulated an argument claiming Trump’s vice president could simply invalidate Biden’s electors, a case also advocated by Trump and his lawyer in that now-notorious coup memo.
The Jan. 6 committee wants to ask Jordan about these things. It also wants to ask Jordan if he had any communications with Trump loyalists in the “Willard War Room” on Jan. 6. As Bob Woodard and Robert Costa of The Post reported, Rudolph W. Giuliani, Stephen K. Bannon and others worked from there to overturn the results in Congress on the day of the insurrection.
At a minimum, then, Jordan can shed light on the true nature of the effort to overturn the election in Congress. A key question: To what degree did participants fully intend for fake claims of voter fraud — which Trump and others corruptly pressured the Justice Department to help validate — to be fabricated as a deliberate pretext for subverting the election results?
Jordan may also be able to shed more light on Trump’s personal conduct during the assault. We know from former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows’s texts that numerous Republicans frantically appealed to Trump to call off the rioters, which he refused to do for a good long time.
Meanwhile, Trump reportedly enjoyed watching the spectacle on TV as it unfolded. So another key question here is whether Trump indicated in some way that he wasn’t calling off the mob precisely because he wanted the violence to continue. Jordan may be able to help illuminate that.
Which leads to an even more unsettling question.
We know that even as the violence unfolded, Trump and Giuliani both made calls to at least one Republican senator, urging him to try to delay the count of presidential electors. This was while Trump supporters were storming the Capitol and looking for lawmakers to intimidate, to physically assault, or, possibly, to kill.
Given all this, it’s becoming clear that the select committee is trying to piece together the following: if Trump and/or his co-conspirators came to see the violence, as it unfolded, to be instrumentally helpful to their ongoing effort at a procedural coup.
Connecting the dots here makes this possibility inescapable. They very well might have seen the violence as helpful in intimidating lawmakers — and then-Vice President Mike Pence — into carrying the procedural coup to fruition.
Given their efforts to seek a delay, it’s obvious they may have seen the violence as a weapon that could help secure this delay. Remember, Pence adamantly refused his security detail’s appeals that he be removed from the premises. He almost certainly understood that such a delay was a very real possibility, might be key to the coup attempt, and that the violence might serve to bring it about.
“From what we now know, it appears that the violence served as a mechanism to try to delay the procedural vote,” Ryan Goodman, co-editor of Just Security, which has extensively analyzed Jan. 6, told me.
Goodman added that efforts to seek a delay as the violence unfolded are an underappreciated “smoking gun” of sorts. “They were desperately trying to stop or delay the vote to buy more time, and they appeared to try to capitalize on the storming of the Capitol to do that,” Goodman said.
Jordan very well could shed light on this, too, as one of the few people in direct communication with the president and possibly his field generals at the Willard, Goodman noted.
“He likely has information highly relevant for investigators to determine how Trump and his close associates were operating once the violence erupted,” Goodman told me.
Given that Jordan has denounced the committee as a “sham,” it’s all but certain that he’ll refuse to cooperate. We have a very good idea of what Jordan can tell us about Trump’s coup attempt, and if and when he refuses, this is what he’ll likely be helping Trump cover up.
