What’s Congress Doing in Response to the Capitol Assault (Besides Impeachment)?

A statue of George Washington underneath the U.S. Capitol rotunda. (Matt Wade, https://tinyurl.com/23ecpvld; CC BY-SA 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en) On Jan. 6, when a mass of rioters confronted a group of law enforcement officers in the U.S. Capitol, they shouted a simple message: “You’re outnumbered. There’s a… million of us out there, and we are listening to Trump.”  Shortly before, the president had admonished his supporters to march on Congress. He told them that unless they fought “like hell,” they would no longer have a country, as lawmakers mere steps away were set to certify an electoral victory for the wrong man.  Democrats lost no time blaming Trump for the violence and death that followed his remarks. In an impeachment resolution introduced on Jan. 11, they charged the president with inciting an insurrection. For the second time in just 13 months, the House Judiciary Committee outlined the factual and constitutional imperative of impeachment. The committee argued that Trump’s “continued hold” on the presidency—“even for only a few more days”—constituted a “clear and present danger.”  The historic second impeachment vote that followed and the start of the Senate trial, the first of a former president, have captured public attention. But the understandable focus on those proceedings has obscured the breadth of work Congress has undertaken in other areas to confront and respond to the assault on Jan. 6.  Even as representatives gathered themselves to impeach Trump and senators prepared again to assume the role of juror, they began to dedicate significant energy toward investigating the insurrection itself. Committees in both the House and the Senate have opened probes into the Capitol assault. And lawmakers have started to consider whether and how to discipline certain colleagues for feeding the lie that led to Jan. 6’s violence—the false notion that widespread fraud and irregularities in the 2020 presidential election allowed President Biden to cheat his way to victory.  Investigations in the House The majority of congressional investigative work has thus far occurred in the House, as the Senate remained out of session between  Jan. 6 and Jan. 19, and committee chairmanships did not transition from Republicans to Democrats until after the upper chamber passed an organizing resolution on Feb. 3.  Two main probes have emerged in the people’s body. The first and narrower of the two, initiated by the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 7, is examining law enforcement’s failure to secure the Capitol and its response to the building’s breach. Rep. Tim Ryan, who helms the House Appropriations Legislative Branch Subcommittee—which oversees funding for the Capitol Police— stated that the subcommittee will hold “hearings to directly question key leaders about what went wrong.” On Jan. 26, the full Appropriations Committee received a closed briefing on the security failures of Jan. 6 from a number of law enforcement and security officials, including the acting chief of Capitol Police, the acting House sergeant-at-arms, the former Army secretary, the commanding general of the D.C. National Guard, the acting chief of D.C. Metropolitan Police, the assistant director of the Secret Service, the assistant attorney general for national security, the acting U.S. attorney for D.C. and the assistant director of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. After the briefing, Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro vowed to continue to pursue answers to questions surrounding the Capitol breach. But the committee has encountered at least some difficulty in this regard. Ryan, for instance, admitted that he has struggled to secure information from Capitol Police leadership, which he described as a “black box.”  The second and broader House probe is a joint venture of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform Committees. In a Jan. 16 letter, the committees announced that they had opened a “review” of “the events of January 6 and related threats against the Nation’s peaceful transition of power.”  The letter specified that the committees’ investigation will follow three inquiries. First, the committees seek to determine what federal law enforcement and the intelligence community knew about threats of violence before, on and after Jan. 6; whether, how, and with whom law enforcement and intelligence entities shared threat information; whether those entities withheld or delayed the dissemination of relevant information; whether the assault on the Capitol had “any nexus to foreign influence or misinformation efforts”; and whether and how “foreign powers” have attempted “to exploit and aggravate the crisis.” Second, the committees will examine whether individuals who currently or formerly held security clearances or positions in U.S. defense, justice and national security agencies took part in the assault. And third, the panels will consider appropriate policy “and other” responses.  To facilitate their investigation, the House Intelligence, Judiciary, Homeland Security and Oversight and Reform Committees have requested a series of briefings on an array of topics from the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Office of Intelligence and Analysis and other relevant DHS components. The panels asked that these briefings—seven total—take place over the course of roughly one month, between Jan. 22 and Feb. 19. Although the committees are conducting their investigation jointly, not every committee will attend every briefing. Of the seven requested briefings, four are intended for the Intelligence Committee alone. All four of the committees will attend the other three briefings.  The descriptions of the briefings outlined in an annex to the committees’ Jan. 16 letter offer further insight into the specifics of their probe. For the week of Feb. 1-5, the Intelligence Committee requested a briefing from the FBI, DHS and NCTC on how the National Vetting Center and Terrorism Screening Center vet and screen “Domestic Violent Extremists.” For this week, Feb. 8-12, the committee has asked ODNI for a briefing on the effectiveness of the “security clearance and background investigation processes intended to identify and mitigate threats posed by violent extremists, including the ongoing transition to recurrent vetting and the integration of rigorous checks of open source information and social media.” The committee has also requested a briefing from NCTC this week on how the agency aids FBI and DHS efforts to counter domestic violent extremists (DVEs). The committee flagged its interest in any information NCTC might have about “transnational links between DVEs and other extremists” and whether the agency is sharing that information with the FBI and DHS.   In addition to briefings, the four committees have requested that the aforementioned executive branch agencies produce all intelligence and documents “that refer[] or relate[] to events that could or ultimately did transpire on January 6, 2021, or refer[] or relate[] to threats in connection with the U.S. presidential inauguration.” The committees’ letter specified that “[a]ll intelligence” means “raw or finished” products. They also noted that these requests for documents and briefings reflected only an initial ask; more will come as the investigation continues. House investigators have begun to make requests of the private sector, too. On Jan. 14, Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, sent a spate of letters to 27 bus, car rental and hotel companies. The letters note that the Trump supporters who attended the “Save America” rally and assaulted the Capitol “relied on a range of companies and services to get them there and house them once they arrived,” effectively “hijack[ing]” those services “to further the January 6 attacks.” To ensure companies do not inadvertently “facilitate violence or domestic terrorism” again, Maloney made three requests. First, she called on the companies to develop and implement “additional screening measures” to determine whether a p
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