- The January 6 committee is working to hash out its endgame ahead of public hearings.
- Liz Cheney maintains that Trump and his allies to the insurrection is mission critical.
- Some Democrats want to drill down on security failures to improve Hill life in general.
Republican Rep. Liz Cheney is working to keep the House January 6 committee trained on former President Donald Trump's role in the attack on the US Capitol more aggressively than some Democratic counterparts as the panel races to finish its year-long investigation.
The Wyoming Republican's insistence on holding the twice-impeached former president and his most ardent supporters in the House Republican caucus accountable for the deadly siege in Washington was on full display last month, The Washington Post reported, as the bipartisan committee mapped out plans for a series of public hearings.
During the discussion, Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy of Florida reportedly made the case for devoting more energy to analyzing the security and intelligence failures that facilitated the deadly breach on Capitol Hill than Trump's behavior.
"Rep. Cheney's view is that security at the Capitol is a critical part of the investigation, but the Capitol didn't attack itself," Cheney spokesman Jeremy Adler told the Post of the need to keep the heat on Trump.
Cheney, who was stripped of her GOP leadership role last year and is facing a Trump-led primary challenger this August, wants Trump-aligned House Republicans who were in any way involved in the election overturning effort to come clean about what happened that day.
The committee subpoenaed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and Reps. Scott Perry, Jim Jordan, Mo Brooks, and Andy Biggs on May 12, though none of the Republicans seemed inclined to comply with the formal request. The panel voted unanimously in December to hold Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in contempt for failing to cooperate with the ongoing investigation.
Trump said Cheney's "like a crazed lunatic" on that panel when it comes to him. "From what I've heard, she's worse than any Democrat," Trump told Post reporters.
The last-minute strategizing by the select committee members comes as they prepare for up to eight public hearings where they're expected to distill down the thousands of documents they've reviewed and hundreds of interviews they've done into a recap of what went wrong on January 6, 2021 and who is ultimately responsible for everything that followed.
A Department of Justice criminal referral against Trump is one potential outcome — but not the only goal, according to Democrats.
"We need to look at this issue from all angles — inclusive of the role the president played as well as the security of the Capitol on that day," Murphy said during the April retreat.
"Cheney has wanted to make sure we keep the focus on Trump and the political effort to overthrow Biden's majority in the electoral college and to attack the peaceful transfer of power," a committee member told Post reporters.