 A year and a half after the January 6th insurrection attempt at the Capitol, by Donald Trump's supporters in the United States, the investigation continues. A panel of members of the House of Representatives is holding a series of public hearings. These hearings look into efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election result of November 2020, which saw Joe Biden coming to power. The hearings come at a time when Trump and many of his supporters continue to insist that he won the election, despite there being no evidence to back the claim. What has been the main outcome of these hearings? Eugene Purir of Breakthrough News explains. The January 6th hearings that have been convened, primarily by the Democratic party, although there is one Republican on the committee, Liz Cheney, who's a well-known anti-Trump Republican, has been rolling out each day with a theme. So many of the things that have come out are not necessarily new, but deeper looks into various elements of what took place with the broader issue they're looking at, which is not just January 6th itself, but what led to it. The broader campaign to decertify or delegitimize the election to try to falsely allow Trump to ascend to the presidency for a second term through a range of different means. So a big focus has been on the old question, who knew what-when element of this? Did Trump know it was fake and did his advisors know it was fake? To the extent that they knew it was fake, did they then act and do different things knowing that this could potentially be illegal, that they were acting on false information, and so on and so forth? So some of the key factors that have come out now is that whatever Trump himself does personally believe, and it's actually not 100% clear if he does in fact believe the hype, that essentially every single person who is advising him, except essentially Rudy Giuliani, said that it was not in fact true that the election was stolen on election night and for the weeks after. And even some of those who were arguing, like the attorney John Eastman, also Rudy Giuliani, that they had some sort of path to the possibility of the presidency were actually themselves admitting that there was no evidence that the election had been stolen, but were acting on their convictions that they had the possibility of raising enough doubt that the election had been stolen, that they should continue to proceed. And this is also in spite the fact that some of the things that they were pursuing were potentially illegal and they knew them to potentially be illegal and were willing to take that risk. One of the other big elements that has come out, and this one is a centerpiece of the Democrats' attempts to appeal to Republican base voters in the fall, in the midterm elections this year, is the fact that Donald Trump and the Trump campaign raised a huge amount of money, tens of millions of dollars for a so-called election defense fund that they led people who were donating to believe was going to go to this attempt to fight what they would say were the fraudulent election results, when in fact there was never such a fund, it was never set up, but in fact, they were raking in this tens of millions of dollars in order to just enrich themselves and do whatever kind of political things they wanted to do. It's also been shown that Trump was encouraging, you know, a significant pressure on everyone from Vice President Mike Pence down to state election officials, several of whom have already testified to essentially falsify the results of the election. And on top of that, that the Trump team did put together a sort of false slate of electors, essentially people who had no legal standing whatsoever to have any involvement in the electoral process of America. But the whole point was that they were trying to pressure these state leaders to cert or Vice President Mike Pence to certify these totally fake, totally fraudulent people. So, you know, the sum total of what we've seen, I think has not been terribly new from what we've seen before, but it's a deeper dive into essentially one basic aspect of the lead up to January 6th, which is that not only was the election not stolen, not only was it very clear that it was not stolen inside the Trump campaign among just about everyone else who was actually looking at the facts and the figures of it, but that despite all of that, they still went forward with an attempt that was going to try to overturn the election on the basis of this fraudulent information, the potential illegal manipulation of the legal process, and of course, the potentiality of using a mob on January 6th to influence the proceedings in Congress to accept this completely fraudulent potentially illegal case. While the investigation has led to quite a few shocking revelations, there is no clarity on whether anyone will be punished. Cases are on against a number of people who participated in the riot on January 6th, 2020, but no top official or politician has been convicted. Will these hearings lead to a process of political or legal accountability for the attempted insurrection? I think the January 6th hearings are going to end up being essentially nothing. I think that for those, and we've seen this already recently in the past few days, the Texas Republican Party passing their platform saying that Joe Biden was not, in fact, elected, and that is in the midst of all of this information coming out, that their exact case they're making is obviously fake and obviously fraudulent, and that's been widely determined. So I think we can see that a large number of people in the sort of Trump camp who want to believe this are going to continue to believe this. So I think sort of what you thought about January 6th beforehand is likely to be what you think is second hand. So politically, I think there won't be much of an element to this. Congress really can't do much else other than release the findings of this hearing. Trump's no longer president. They can't impeach him. And legally, there are many people who are saying that a lot of what's been laid out by the January 6th hearings could potentially lead to some legal action against President Trump, particularly around the fraud element of fundraising. But it seems highly unlikely from a political perspective that the Attorney General is going to want to pursue any of those charges because, of course, that would essentially just sort of supercharge and relitigate the situation we saw around January 6th. And I think it certainly wouldn't help the Democrats politically. It would absolutely drive enthusiasm in the Republican base. And who knows what the implications of that might be, because it's such a closely held belief by such a wide percentage of the right wing in America that Trump did in fact win and the election was in fact stolen that I think it's not that likely at all. So I think the impact of it will probably be mainly historical, more than anything else, and getting a number of things on the record, showing that a number of people who essentially represented themselves as believing that Trump perhaps did win or that he did in fact win were lying and that they had given different information to both Trump himself and to the investigators in the January 6th committee. Some of that hypocrisy will come out. But ultimately, what it really comes down to, I think, is that there's not going to be a true admission from the second major party in America, the Republican Party, that on the basis of totally false, quite frankly, racist evidence claiming that Latino people, black people in league with the ghost of Hugo Chavez had stolen the elections in the United States, they're not going to actually admit that that was what they were willing to do to totally contravene democracy. And as such a major part of the broader political situation, if you have total intransigence from one of the major parties, the possibility of really anything coming out of this, I think is low. When you look at the issue of Watergate, Watergate was bipartisan. You look at the issue of the Clinton impeachment, the issue was not bipartisan, it was really bipartisan. So ultimately, you can see how the ability to have these partisan moves in Congress really don't do that much other than to create a lot of heat and light. Despite the considerable amount of evidence implicating Trump, many sections of the Republican Party have doubled down in his support. The questioning of the 2020 election results has become a key marker of the party's drift further into the right wing. This also poses a challenge for institutions and the electoral process in the United States. This is because one party is increasingly committed to subverting electoral processes in the future as well. This development also needs to be seen in the context of the increasing number of voter suppression laws in the country. What does all of this mean for the democratic process in the US? You know, it's an interesting question. I mean, it's almost quite frankly stunning to see how those who are basing their political campaigns for this year on the fall on the fraudulent claims of a stolen election seem to be doing better. I mean, you have the governor of Pennsylvania, a number of different officials. And in some ways, this is a sort of a very scary reality because what you see amongst governors, amongst secretaries of state and others who actually have some level of control over the electoral machinery is that in 2024, if there are similar issues. And, you know, one thing that is fair to say here is there is a little bit of gray area around the exact legalities of transitional processes. So if you can get yourself in a position where you can raise enough doubt by which one of these individuals in the state legislature and a secretary of state and a gubernatorial chair can rule, you might have more states where that ends up being the case and enough states to potentially overturn an election result. People who are willing to do things that past Republican officials were not willing to do in 2020. And so I think just on that note in and of itself, there is a certainly a real incredible fear that the Republican Party is moving more aggressively. And again, I'll reference the Texas Republican Party platform, Texas is the second largest state in America. And the Republican Party there is one of the largest and one of the most essential to the broader Republican scheme. I mean, you know, they're openly saying that, you know, things like the Voting Rights Act should be repealed. They actually want to eliminate one person, one vote in Texas and have a state level electoral college. I mean, really, the Republican Party is turning towards an extreme anti-democratic agenda or at least a relatively anti-democratic agenda, because their perception of where the country is going, you know, in terms of the growth of working class people of color in many different communities around the country, young people becoming more and more progressive is that sort of demographic, demographically, numerically, there aren't enough people to actually support these hard right hyper capitalist policies. And thus they need to go deeper and deeper into manipulating the electoral machinery in a way that they can essentially curate the electorate to favor their candidates, which we already have such an undemocratic system here. So I think that really everything we're seeing really portends a deeper turn. I think at the state level in Congress and many places, we're seeing many, many more people elected who are doubling down on what's happening. And I think that really the result is going to be that as universal suffrage comes into, you know, growing contradiction with the desire of capitalists to use the political system to control everything, the more and more we're going to see the Republican Party and elements of the Democratic Party to be honest with you, but principally the Republican Party continue, I think, to deepen their extreme anti-democratic methods at every level from local to the federal to try to make sure that there is not a true, you know, one person, one vote, go to the polls kind of democracy in America. I mean, you've seen, you know, almost every state actually, they have, you know, they put in a lot of voter suppression laws, but you know, you have certainly 21-22 states that, you know, it's basically guaranteed that whatever law is put in front of the legislature to restrict voting will pass. 30 some states where there is a good chance for it. So you can see from a statutory level, you can see from a rhetorical level, and you can certainly see from a level of just what people are claiming they're going to do in various state level executive positions, that there's a strong push and a strong move on all fronts really to restrict the right to vote in the United States.